'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

"'What happens when language is let into places where words fail? Here, a transportive experience: naked, vertiginous, defiant — an astonishing illumination of the possibilities in being beside oneself'" - Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Deep House

"'This is writing as rebuilding, each sentence placed unwaveringly on the page. . .Siken is a deadpan virtuoso of the wrongfooting observation, his prose flickering between confessions. . . A spectacular comeback'" - Prospect

"'A remarkable return that thrums with reinvention: of the self, of the prose poem, of the false divide between the everyday and the surreal. Very engaging and exciting’" - Andrew McMillan

"'Siken’s signature intensity still throbs between sentences. . .In I Do Know Some Things, the risk is not that of desire, as it is in Crush, but that of a different annihilating force: the vanishing of a self'" - Richie Hofmann, The Yale Review

"Direct, moving, disquieting… Siken’s new, flattened style is made up of painstaking, slow-moving sentences and isolated words… I Do Know Some Things is not just a set of prose poems but a book about disability advocacy. Siken’s new work shows him coming to terms with his changed body" - London Review of Books