A Review of Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things — August 7, 2025 by Christopher Nelson
In March of 2019 Richard Siken had a stroke. I Do Know Some Things is, on one level, a non-linear chronicle of that experience, of devastation, of fear and bravery, of tenacity and will. We’re there on sidewalk as he crawls to the curb, there in hospital admitting room when they don’t believe he’s had a stroke, and there as, with handwriting “big and crooked,” he rebuilds his world and relearns language: “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall.”
Despite an uncertain prognosis, he did heal, came back from hell, and lived to tell. One of the book’s many powers is that it tells all, and Siken names names: his father murdered his first wife, his internationally famous first book has lies in it, his mother was a cult leader, as a boy he had a crush on his friend’s father, and so on. There’s a disarming nakedness to these poems—hard facts often free from figurative language and the mythological framing we see more frequently in his earlier books. In “Wheelchair,” for example, he writes, “The body, the body, get back in your body… When I was awake, I did my stretches or clocked laps around the building: down the long halls of patient rooms and nurses’ desks with the telephones and noises, the day room with the puzzles on the tables and the comfortable chairs, backwards through the patio door to get over the bump of the metal strip and around the gazebo, then inside again.”
On another level, however, the book is much more than an account of illness and recovery; it is a recapitulation of a life. We are granted full admission into the private vignettes of his past that shaped the identity he is trying to re-understand: familial dysfunction, divorce, drug use—all rich with pathos, remarkably sad, and absorbing. In “Horoscope” he writes, “Our father just wanted a son that wasn’t broken. That hadn’t broken. That he hadn’t broken yet.” And later in the same poem, “Once, I tried to get my horoscope charted. She wouldn’t finish. She said Sorry about your dad and gave me my money back.” In another poem he writes about coming out of the closet to his father and stepmother when he was in the tenth grade as they were dropping him off at his mother’s house: “They sat, still and silent, in the front seat. They didn’t turn around….They said nothing, wouldn’t look at me. I unlatched my seat belt and got out of the car. I went inside. I don’t know how long they sat there before they drove away. They never came back.”
The book’s seven sections contain seventy-seven prose poems. While it is a form Siken has used before, it’s been only occasional; here it is absolute. Blocks of text, boxes—containment, treasure, Pandora. The paragraph not the stanza; the sentence not the line. The acrobatics, the sound-and-sense possibilities of enjambment and the propulsion of the jagged line—these are gone. Instead we have the stolid, no-nonsense paradox of the prose poem, which is not to say these poems are prosaic. In an interview with Z.L. Nickels published in Bomb Magazine, Siken explains that after the stroke he would get lost amid lineation, that the unbroken line was a cognitive necessity. Within the apparently predictable form of the prose poem, Siken engages the meditative mode to amazing and various effects. Confession is here, so is narrative and philosophical inquiry; sometimes the mind follows a single track, sometimes two—and those are sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent. One of the most elegant features of I Do Know Some Things is how fluid and graceful is its nonlinearity. We move from the hospital to childhood to mindscapes without a bump. The stroke broke everything—that’s made clear early on. Mind, identity, body, and time are fractured; the prose poem, it turns out, is the perfect foil for that shattering. In “Redshift” there’s a hallucinatory moment that illustrates the temporal wizardry of the book: “Down the street a man is beating his wife again, all night, the same night, years before and still tonight, even though she left him long ago.” One comes away from these poems considering that the illusion of time—its confusion—is its seeming linearity.
It would be unfair to not acknowledge the playfulness of these poems as well, a playfulness that belies their serious subjects. Of the many things to admire about Siken’s recovery, perhaps the most heroic is his humor. Not only is the book about a horrifying illness and a history of dysfunction, it is also populated by marshmallow cats, an auteur line cook, a ten-year-old prankster, a snowball throwing bear, et al. “When you fall into a well,” he writes, “you have to sit there for a minute. You have to respect the well before you try to get out.”
Richard Siken is out, and we are indebted to him. In this heartfelt, asynchronous, and beautifully strange chronicle of his stroke and its aftermath, he illuminates the labyrinths of memory, selfhood, and time. And we’re all brighter for it.
