I Do Know Some Things

‘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’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod * 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 *

Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Gl ck, 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 and I Do Know Some Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Siken lives in Tucson, Arizona.