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I Do Know Some Things
  • Published: 7 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781784746629
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

I Do Know Some Things

  • Richard Siken
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A collection of pitch-perfect prose poems written in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic stroke. From the author of cult poetry bestseller, Crush

'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
  • Published: 7 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781784746629
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

Praise for I Do Know Some Things

'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'

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Prospect

'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

'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

'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

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