Richard Siken

*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist* I Do Know Some Things is a brave book, both in content and method. 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 seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.

I Do Know Some Things

sage lynn

Her boyfriend at the time was a walk-in: a man so previously sad that his original self had left its body and something else had grabbed the wheel.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. We are what we say we are. What am I? I’m not sure I want to know anymore and I’m not supposed to say that. I’m tired of telling this story. Let’s put on a show. I’ll throw my voice and populate the landscape. Let me invent an imaginary friend so I can talk to myself, or at least take the ghost of my missing friends and pretend that they’re still here. 

Hey buddy, you’re gonna be fine. We’re not going anywhere.

 Let me say it in the third person, talking about myself: 

Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.

When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history. It floods the landscape, it burns the cities to the ground. Tell someone to get over it and you’ve made yourself an enemy, but you have to get over it. There is no room, there is no new room. The fire is not moving away.

When you fall into a well you have to sit there for a minute. You have to respect the well before you try to get out. So what’s there to be learned? There’s nothing to be learned. This isn’t a lesson, it’s just a fact.

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