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Richard Siken is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. He is the author of the collections Crush, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and War of the Foxes. Siken co-founded Spork Press, where he continues to work as an editor. More about this author >
It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its 77 prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
The beauty of Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things rests on its journalistic sharing of memories recalled without the power to differentiate their truths. Like a ghost able to ascertain the cause for its haunting of its once-home only by continuing to do so, Siken’s book bears witness to him relearning an intimacy with his own life. In order to seemingly survive, these poems come by way of a vanishing of artifice, and the nakedness we are left with as a result reveals a book both subtly powerful and surprisingly tender.
Richard Siken at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
