Richard Siken Books

A powerful collection of poems driven by obsession reveals a poetry that is at once confessional, gay, savage, and charged with a violent eroticism. Simultaneous.

In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Yale Series of Younger Poets prize-winner Richard Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention.

The long-anticipated third collection from the revered Richard Siken delivers his most personal and introspective collection yet. Richard Siken's long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with a body forgetting itself--"the mind that / didn't work, the leg that wouldn't move...". Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won't connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: "dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged." To say "black tree" when one means "night."Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. "Part insight, part anecdote," he is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in "The field [that] had been swept clean of habit."