I Do Know Some Things

The long-anticipated third collection from the revered Richard Siken delivers his most personal and introspective collection yet.

Richard Siken's long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with a body forgetting itself-"the mind that / didn't work, the leg that wouldn't move...". Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won't connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: "dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged." To say "black tree" when one means "night."Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. "Part insight, part anecdote," he is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in "The field [that] had been swept clean of habit."

“Cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power. . . . Books of this kind dream big [and] restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”—Louise Glück, from the Foreword to Crush 

“If we think about Crush as an extended elegy, then we can think about War of the Foxes as an extended ars poetica—a poem about the act of writing a poem. This commentary on creating might come from the fact that Siken is not only a poet, but also a painter—his hands are always making, in one medium or another.”—Southeast Review

“Siken has written a book that is completely universal, by which I mean, this book is a universe unto itself. By which I mean, when visited, this book introduces you to people you think you recognize, but just can’t place. These poems want you to think you have read them before, & maybe you have, but you weren’t the same person then, & you aren’t the same person now.”—Adroit Journal

"Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency that makes this one of the best books of contemporary poetry."—Victoria Chang, Huffington Post

“Richard Siken’s Crush changed poetry for me; after reading this book, poetry suddenly became something that was passionate, tender, and complicated, but also accessible. This was the book that made me think I might want to read a collection of poems as much as I’d want to read a novel, something I’d never even imagined.”—Minnesota Review

"War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken's first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases - the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion."—The Rumpus

Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glck, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Lannan Fellowships, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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