I Do Know Some Things
$22.00
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$22.00
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Copper Canyon Press
I Do Know Some Things
$22.00
Sale price
$22.00
Regular price
*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist*
I Do Know Some Things is a brave book, both in content and method.It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one's life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns's shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
Book Details
- Publisher:
- Copper Canyon Press
- ISBN:
- 9781556596247
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Pages:
- 128
- Authors:
- Richard Siken
- Published Date:
- 2025-08-26
- Language:
- English
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About Richard Siken
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Which poetry book are you currently reading?
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken. Siken really takes the prose poem in exciting new directions, and his own questioning of storytelling within the text is something I think about a lot, and it's great to see how he explores the stories that construct the self.
Which poetry book are you currently reading?
I Do Know Some Things, by Richard Siken. Do you know the British television series Doctor Who? In the show, the TARDIS is a time-traveling spaceship that’s astoundingly bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. There’s a similar TARDIS-like quality in these prose poems—they keep expanding into different dimensions.
Which poetry book are you currently reading?
I am currently reading Richard Siken's I Do Know Some Things. I picked up Siken's new book, which I had already heard great things about, after listening to him on The New Yorker poetry podcast, which I also recommend. In the episode he spoke of what it might mean to have to tell the truth in this book. Of course he has told different sorts of truths in figures and fables in other books, but something about reading this book right now, prose poems and childhood and recovering from a stroke and about re-learning words, wholly stripped down of artifice, and maybe especially in a time when you're less sure than ever that you're talking to an actual human felt galvanizing and necessary and intimate all at once. It's a wonder.