Reviewed by A. C. Riffer
It feels almost impossible to write about Richard Siken without a little nervousness. His new collection, I Do Know Some Things, arrives with the weight of time and loss behind it, his first book in nearly a decade, and yet its voice feels startlingly alive. Siken writes with an honesty that stings and heals in equal measure. Grief, love, injustice, self-reckoning—he approaches each as both subject and texture, letting language carry the feeling.
“I feel clumsy attempting to write this review,” I wrote in my notes, and I still do. But maybe that’s fitting. Siken’s poetry makes language feel inadequate in the best way. Each poem stretches toward clarity, falters, and then builds beauty from that faltering. “They asked the wrong questions. I gave the wrong answers,” he confesses early on (“Sidewalk,” p. 10), and the line becomes a thesis for the collection: that survival and comprehension are both imperfect acts.
Across these pages, memory and physics intertwine; the world turning, refracting, expanding until meaning itself becomes uncertain. “This side of myself, now on this side of myself” (“Superposition,” p. 33) captures that doubling perfectly: a speaker split between observation and participation, haunted by what can’t be fixed. In “Orbit,” he writes, “My favorite ugly places, where I would dwell endlessly: old wounds, slights, embarrassments. Now the weight of their importance seemed questionable” (p. 36). It’s a line that feels like forgiveness, or at least a hand reaching toward it.
Siken remains unmatched in his ability to render yearning as both intellectual and visceral. “I wanted to have a human moment but I didn’t trust myself,” he admits in “Drug Plane” (p. 39), and that distrust becomes part of his poetics. His speakers want to connect but can’t stop analyzing the circuitry of connection itself. Even when he tries to “say it plain, see if it’s powerful,” he acknowledges the temptation to “say it slant, see if it’s possible” (“Nonfiction,” p. 94). Truth and art wrestle openly here; syntax becomes survival.
Reading I Do Know Some Things feels like stepping into a mind that refuses easy resolution. “We are the stories we tell ourselves. I didn’t remember the story,” he admits in “Doubt” (p. 43). The result is a book that lives between remembering and rewriting, between chaos and grace.
The closing pages gather that momentum into something urgent: “We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide” (“Fauna,” p. 108). That collision, between beauty and ruin, body and myth, is where Siken has always lived. This time, though, there’s a kind of peace in the wreckage, a hard-won quiet.
I Do Know Some Things is luminous and unflinching, the work of a poet still wrestling with how to be alive inside language. It leaves you changed, not because it offers answers, but because it insists on asking the right questions.
Title: I Do Know Some Things
Author: Richard Siken
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Year: 2025
Read A. C.’s review of Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability from Squirmy & Grubs and Other Interabled Couples in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
A. C. Riffer is a hopeless romantic and enigmatically so. In their spare time, they somehow managed to earn a doctorate in Social Work from the University of Illinois Chicago, where their research explored censorship and culture.