I Do Know Some Things

‘A transportive experience: naked, vertiginous, defiant‘ Jeremy Atherton Lin ‘A spectacular comeback‘ Jeremy Noel Tod, Prospect ‘Siken‘s signature intensity still throbs between sentences‘ The Yale Review A collection of pitch-perfect prose poems written in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic stroke. From the author of cult poetry bestseller, Crush. Richard Siken‘s Crush was an underground international sensation. Twenty years on, he returns with the momentous I Do Know Some Things, cinematic in its tragic vision and emotive force. In the aftermath of a stroke, the poet‘s language and much of his memory is, for a time, wiped out. As his mind gropes its way back from oblivion, the scenery flickers between memories of a ruptured childhood and queer coming-of-age, and the precipice of the present. Each poem is a room in a ‘house owned by ghosts‘. In these seventy-seven prose poems, Siken has forged a new voice at once terrifying and vital. Brave in content and in method, I Do Know Some Things demands his recognition as an essential poet of our times. ‘Thrums with reinvention: of the self, of the prose poem, of the false divide between the everyday and the surreal‘ Andrew McMillan Praise for Crush: ‘Cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power‘ Louise Glück ‘The immense wingspan of influence that Crush has on 21st-century American poetry cannot be overstated‘ Ocean Vuong