By Jonathan Chan

I Do Know Some Things
Richard Siken
Copper Canyon Press (2025) / 128 pages / SGD 36.34

What is a prose poem? It is not a new form, by any means, but its name seems to hold, if not contradiction, then an inherent tension. Conventional definitions suggest that it is a piece of imaginative poetic writing in prose, or a composition printed as prose that names itself poetry. Prose and poetry can sometimes be seen as defined in opposition to one another, with the former lacking the sense of contrivance that can be constitutive of the latter. The prose poem, having emerged in the mid-19th century, originating among French writers, compresses the density and allusiveness of poetry, crucially, into a form without line breaks. Yet, what differentiates it from a novel chapter or piece of micro-fiction, in my view, is the lessened weight on conventional characteristics of narrative writing, without a specific subject or narrative arc.

The prose poem can appear on the page like an imposing square, or block, of text, dense and concentrated in the presentation and sequencing of metaphor, symbol and other sonic elements. This can lend the prose poem a sense of momentum, or continuity, in its procession across different presentations of thought and image. Some contemporary manifestations of the prose poem sometimes introduce the slash in between segments, symbolising a line break, even if the line break is absent from the poem's body itself. It is not a form foreign to my own writing. I have occasionally turned to it in pursuit of that semblance of uninterrupted thought. The terror of the perpetual run-on stanza can lend to the prose poem a strained sense of unity across disparate elements.

The prose poem is the single form present in Richard Siken's I Do Know Some Things (2025). There ceases to be a mere sense of the prose poem's aesthetic or technical characteristics when it is understood that the form was not chosen so much as it was linked to Siken's recovery after a stroke in 2019. Siken describes in an interview with Poets.org being paralysed on his right side and losing his memory and capacity for language, being hospitalised in a month followed by a physical rehabilitation facility for several more. The process of therapy that followed involved Siken having to learn again how to walk, write, recognise, remember and speak. The poems he published in the years that followed from 2020 were, as critic and scholar Stephanie Burt describes, "strung together sentences about the parts of his life he could, sometimes, recall, using the English he had slowly reacquired, and pursuing the understated astonishment, or surprise, or even confusion, that now accompanied his use of language." She elaborates that the "verse line – meant for overlapping parts, gaps and incomplete interpretations – doesn't serve someone who has to work hard to complete any utterance."

I Do Know Some Things, through this lens, can be understood as a form of disability poetics. This draws on a broad gamut of experiences, ranging from neurodivergence to chronic pain to being deaf or blind, that also refuses the stereotype of inspiration or resilience. The experiences of Siken's speakers amidst the debilitation of a stroke and recovery from it suggest the infrastructural and systemic inadequacies for the disabled in America. Herein, I think as well of 'crip' poetics, the abbreviation of 'cripple' that reclaims lived disabled experiences as a source of pride, community and joy, of the intersection of disability and overlapping systems of power. This is not an association taken up by Siken himself, but the use of the prose poem to break conventional forms is adjacent to the work of crip poets. To understand Siken's as a queer disability poetics is to recognise the forms of caregiving the speaker receives beyond the bounds of the cis-heteronormative familial mode, a difference underscored between the care he renders to his father and the care he receives in the aftermath of a stroke.

It draws a stark contrast with Siken's previous two collections Crush (2005) and War of the Foxes (2015). The former, selected by Louise Glück for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, has been vaunted into mythic status, decontexualised and transformed by its interpolation within fandom cultures. The latter's focus on scenes of animals and ekphrastic responses turned Siken towards a starker surrealism, reflecting on the nature of poetry itself. In his afterword to the 20th-century edition of Crush, Siken writes that "(w)hat was originally a book about AIDS had arrived in a culture filled with vampires". This would include the Twilight films and the TV shows Supernatural and True Blood. Metaphors for blood "no longer focused on contamination and death" but became "a conduit for romance, for eternal life". Siken's depictions of a raw, seedy, queer America inspired legions of imitators, earned him the moniker responsible for a revival in confessional poetry, and made a cameo in the series Heartstopper. His poems would become superimposed over slash ships, such as the procedural drama series 9-1-1. This seemed to become a source of irritation (sometimes adjudicated over X/Twitter, also in the aforementioned afterword), as fan fiction and meme homages (which still bring to mind most immediately Tumblr) seemed to obscure the historical homophobia out of which the book emerged, in the aftermath of the peak of the AIDS crisis and the prejudice preceding the legalisation of same-sex marriage in America. "The terror and loneliness of being gay that had informed the poems had diminished," he writes in the same afterword, the "claustrophobic atmosphere of impending violence [having been] reframed."

Both books feature a plenitude of discrete lines and line breaks, as well as long, multi-segment poems spanning pages. By contrast, the line break vanishes in I Do Know Some Things; in Siken's poem 'Line': "I wouldn't break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was already broken." He explains in an interview losing his sense of the line after his stroke, "I was going to measure my progress by my ability to make a paragraph, to convey a single thought completely. This meant that every poem was going to be a block of text, a single paragraph." Part of this is a matter of technology: in his afterword to the 20th-anniversary edition of Crush, Siken describes using "dictation software" rather than a "notebook", blunting the ease of presenting line breaks.

Perhaps the through-line is a perpetual concern with the self, its truth and authenticity, in the (queer) light of the confessional mode and its desperation. Siken's influence has rippled outward to Singapore, with writers such as Ally Chua and Kenneth Constance Loe citing him as an influence, though it surely persists among poets who have been categorised as confessional. Cyril Wong might be one such parallel figure.

With its 77 poems split into 11 even sections, I Do Know Some Things proceeds in diaristic chunks of prose, mirroring Siken's recovery of language following his stroke, sometimes through minutiae and detail of therapy sessions, in others through sudden recollections of childhood and adolescence. There can sometimes be an unvarnished quality to these poems, being as they are a record of Siken's physical recovery, propelled by meditations on moments leading to self-definition and an exploration of the conceptual terms he used to rebuild himself, as he described in an interview with Poets.org. "There is no artifice. It is autobiographical, and it does not fabricate or lie. I like to lie. I like to invent things. I just wasn't able to. I lost my guile and my poker face," he attests. The lack of this fictive veneer is a departure from Siken's earlier work. Each section is themed around a form of ownership: of death, history, body, language, autonomy, imagination and creation. One feels the viscera of fighting to return, to survive, out of the debilitation of mental and physical injury.

Family memories assume a central role to the recovery of the sense of self. Many of Siken's poems delve into recollections of familial tension, wounding and departure. The book's first poem, 'Real Estate', opens with, "My mother married a man who divorced her for money." It proceeds to describe the speaker's mother's spending on jewellery and subsequent divorce, from a man who is not the speaker's father, whom the speaker yet assumes responsibility for in the years leading into his death. "I couldn't prove it, I couldn't get a death certificate," he states. "Their names remain on the deed to the house." The speaker declares that "When I die […] There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me." This is what prefaces Siken's narrative, or recollection, of his stroke. A memory of family lives on through the lingering of ghosts and a breaking into the present.

The poems that follow are similarly unsparing. In 'Family Therapy':

The morning after my father killed his first wife, he woke up next to her dead body, rose from their bed, and began his morning routine. At lunch, from his office, he called the landlord and asked him to check on her […] The other son had always been more tender, gullible. And it was his mother, not mine, so you can see how it would be easier for me to get my head around it. They watched each other, trying to figure who was getting their head around it. The therapist watched my father. My father watched the other son.

In 'Beet Soup':

My grandmother slams her hand against the kitchen counter. The egg drips gold and glossy down the front of the cabinet drawers. She has come to live with us as she recovers from her stroke. Her speech is slurred and her movements are jerky. I wipe egg off the cabinet with a paper towel but I am not tall enough to reach the counter. I put the eggs away and we have cereal for breakfast. I pour the milk. After breakfast she starts dinner, borscht, which seems like a bad choice. It is not a put-a-chicken-in-a-pot kind of soup. We will need to do a lot of chopping and we don't trust each other with the knives. I stand on a chair and chop the vegetables very carefully, under her uneasy supervision. A beet is a serious thing.

The plainness of Siken's language cuts through the veneer of image or allusion. It is episodic, verging on auto-fictional. There is no extravagant emotional mediation. Each anecdote holds within it the implicit anticipation of the speaker's stroke: a consciousness of death, a recollection of emotional clarity, a hint of hereditary possibility. The first divorce makes an appearance in 'Albondigas' in the book's fourth section, revolving around a Red Lobster in which the speaker receives news of divorce, then news of their father's impending marriage, sandwiching the arrival of a housekeeper who prepared Mexican food like Albondigas. The speaker's first mother sends a "postcard with a picture of the Eiffel tower" with "domestic postage". In 'Cult Leader', the speaker's mother is described as a reluctant cult leader assuming the role of a guru. In 'Kitchen Window', the speaker fantasises of his friend's father as his stepfather, speaking with "the gentle unavailability one reserves for creatures that are wounded and backed into a corner". The accretion of images feels more like a series of revelations, an impulse to honesty comparable to Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle. The plainness of hurts, frustrations and memory fragments.

These poems are entwined with Siken's poems describing the experience of having a stroke, and the process of recovery after. 'Sidewalk' emerges after four poems of family memories:

I went back and locked the door and stood in front of the house to wait for my friend but I wasn't standing in front of the house, I was lying on the sidewalk with my face in my shoulder bag because I couldn't stand up and I was afraid it would scare my friend, so I rolled on my side and propped myself up with my weak arm while my legs sprawled out behind me. I held my bag tight to my chest and tried to look casual, with my crooked smile and unfocused eyes. […] They put me in the waiting room, which I knew was wrong, and I realized that I had messed it up because I didn't call for an ambulance. I kept falling asleep in the waiting room. I looked much worse, slack and crooked, the two sides of my face moving at different speeds. I went back to the desk and said Help. They put me in a room. No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways. Some people get stuck on the first thing you say and they don't let you finish your syllogism. They asked the wrong questions. I gave the wrong answers. They thought I was faking it. I said Numb. I meant getting numb, more numb, half of me mostly numb. They said Lift your leg. I did, a few inches. It was heavy, they were mad. You aren't paralyzed. They kept missing the point: None of this was normal. I Do Know Some Things. I was making strange and ambiguous gestures. I was trying to tell them about the door and the ambulance and the sidewalk. The doctor decided I was having a panic attack and discharged me.

In this instance, plain language transforms into its own source of terror. The descriptions are clear. The misunderstandings are articulated, albeit in hindsight through the certain voice of the speaker. The detailing of the account feels almost like a police report. Rather than a comedy of errors, the poem presents a self-effacing account of miscommunication, except the stakes are tied to an immediate health emergency, compounded by the indignity of being called a liar in a state of helplessness, or debility. The incapacity of language transforms the speaker in the process as the anaphoric 'I' brings the reader through the physical, mental and emotional strictures of having a stroke. To a non-American reader, the trope of a broken healthcare system emerges, one in which an ambulance ride becomes a financial disincentive to someone having a stroke. The descriptions of the waiting room read almost as hyperbolic. Perhaps it is an indictment of the American health system, even if not forthrightly so. This is not the speaker's first stroke. The misrecognition, or dismissal, of the stroke reveals a handling of the truth in a way that feels fragile, and fraught, even despite the speaker's certainty of his situation. The prose poem allows the speaker's narrative, and knowledge, to cohere and find structure again. It is a form to cling to in spite of this refusal.

In 'Metonymy', he describes: "I slept, I peed myself, I fell out of the mattress, I fell out of chairs talking wildly." This time at a second hospital in an emergency room a receptionist says, "Oh no, you've had a stroke." The onset of a slowed language appears: "I said black tree when I meant night. I said The branches blow and we sleep in dirt." In 'Bed', language loss makes itself more conspicuous: "There were few nouns. They wouldn't connect […] I didn't know now, I couldn't find the latches, and every few hours I found myself at baseline, staccato, returned to tonic." The speaker answers "in song lyrics and scraps of poetry. Twenty-nine dollars and an alligator purse." He remarks, "It would have been funny except for the yelling." The fits and starts are described as "cried jags, hair-trigged", "neurological", "endless". There is a mental fog that creates confusion, misapprehension, suspicion. In 'Yardstick', the speaker cannot "say it straight so I tried saying around it dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged", "[blathering] in loops—repetitive, elliptical". Kennings conjoin the words and approximate, then create new meaning. The speaker, the poet, cannot find the words, the precision of language. The speaker declares "I had lost my poker face, my guile, and I was in danger of betraying my secrets and everyone else's." Poeticism becomes its own source of agony. Plainness cuts through contrivance.

Allusion and recollection pervade the speaker's path to recovery. In 'The List', the speaker describes himself as "Hamlet in a long line of Hamlets" to nurses, with a grief counsellor and suicide counsellor, handwriting "big and crooked. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder." A first notebook is a "working glossary", a second notebook to contain "venom and hard feelings". In 'The Waves', perhaps a sly Woolf reference, the completion of a thought is akin to sailing through a tempest:

That there could be a rosy-fingered, wine-dark sea consequently breaking. I am the mermaids singing, twister in the sheets. I am, I have, I know and say. I know, I have, I will and do. Whitecaps and froth. I yelled at the waves. The ghost of myself slept deep. Try to finish, finish the thought. Do not drop anchor here.

This is the pathetic fallacy of the recovering mind, summoning the parlance of the Odyssey and Moby Dick, every utterance a contention against surrendering to a storm. 'The Subjunctive' reads like a series of conjugation exercises, grammatical variations of the conditional:

He sleeps. He is sleeping. They hope that he is sleeping. They wait for him while he is sleeping or they don't. He will be better after a while or he won't.

Memory loss afflicts not only the recovery of language but the conditions for physical recovery. In 'Superposition', the speaker can remember neither tenses nor the house they have been living in. The speaker begins to mirror each person he speaks to: "constantly shifting my tone and adjusting my vocabulary", "[looking] ulterior". It creates a frustration that ripples outward. In 'Mind Control', the speaker fails at using "mind-control techniques [he] learned from the cult" but is unable to "wiggle [his] toes". The speaker recalls having a "body of light" made of "photons", once teleporting and watching their friends sleeping. The memory of astral projection, or pretending to do it, loosens the constraint of the impaired body. In 'Doubt', the speaker describes laps in a facility in a wheelchair. An absent friend (or lover?) leads the speaker to muse, "Doubt is not a weakness. Doubt is a lack of certainty." In 'Orbit', the speaker describes an unravelling after being moved into a rehab facility from the hospital, leading to his friend Drew not being able to find him. After the hurry of relocation, amid the frustration of losing control, the speaker declares:

I dredged up deeper shames. I didn't know who had forgiven me or hadn't. I circled new darknesses, things I had buried. I forgot how to suppress them. A satellite finds its orbit once it's hurled around the earth, endlessly falling as it's held in place. A planet circles in its groove; it finds its path, a dirt rut—and that's the shape of things. The solar system spins in its galactic arm, nine trillion miles long. The center holds but moves.

Symbolism makes its grand return to describe a promise of finding a new pace, a new rhythm amidst dramatic disorientations. The difficulty of containing old memories is what accounts for the eruption of familial traumas and hurts, patterned throughout the collection. The confessional impulse is uncorked, without volition, as the poet experiences the advancing of injury and age.

More proximate memories of family emerge as the book progresses, beyond the old vagaries of childhood. 'Driveway' details the death of the speaker's father's third wife, abrupt, leaving the father to ask "Who will take care of me now?" What follow are descriptions of the speaker tending to household chores and running errands, the reality of the speaker "managing our father and the estate I had been disinherited from". A will reveals the existence of another son. This makes a reappearance later in the poem 'Horoscope', in which the speaker learns he knows the son, a friend of a friend playing bass in a local band, a realisation of each subsequent son the father fathers being a son the father hopes "wasn't broken". In 'Heart Valve', the father's third wife is presented in memory, someone who "garnished drinks with fruit chunks and paper umbrellas", someone who "put tiny, decorative, shell-shaped soaps in the bathrooms when company came over". Her death unbridles the speaker's father who "had a bad heart valve" and cancer. The disowning of the speaker is given cause as the speaker reveals a religious bigotry; the homophobic father says to his son "You're an abomination." Momentarily, in these visions of domesticity and wounding, there is a reminder of the speaker's whiteness within the fold of a religious and abusive America, in which queer people have so often been cast out. Yet, the speaker continues to care for the father, perhaps out of filial duty or compulsion, and is re-inherited. The poem concludes with the father being moved into assisted living, falling in love with a fellow resident, before opting to spend less time with the speaker in favour of another son prior to his death, a series of continual displacements.

The sense of slippage his speaker experiences, that which he lacks in terms of somatic control, leads to descriptions of moving in and living with friends to receive care, or at least to be monitored. 'Guesthouse' depicts the speaker's friend James moving him into a one-room studio with fewer stairs, minimising the steps the speaker needs to take to the bathroom. The speaker "slept on the floor" on his first night out of fear of "[falling] out of bed". The speaker uses a walker, showers seated, and "would crawl out and lay on a towel until [he] was dry enough to pull [himself] up to the toilet without slipping". The studio is a "guesthouse", rather than a "real house", as a transitory residence. A neurologist describes to the speaker the damage he has sustained in the poem 'Heat Map'. The speaker finds it "Nauseating". The assessment is unflinching. "I ruined myself with bad living. He isn't saying it but he's saying it." 'Pain Scale' returns to describing a brokenness in the American healthcare system. The speaker's physician "wants [him] to say My pain is eight, instead of Thunderous and unsettling". Conventional medical parlance refuses the speaker's insistence that he has "never been fine". "I think many people struggle with my aesthetic," the speaker states flatly. The speaker describes being sent by insurance to the first hospital that did not believe he was having a stroke, hospitals not sharing charts, crying in a second hospital while being weighed and having blood pressure taken, and the assumption of "showing drug-seeking behaviour". Siken's recollection of his own experience of caregiving contextualises the care he receives beyond the hospital and the rehab facility with his friends; within the ambit of a queer framing, the caregiving he receives refuses the cis-heteronormative form of caregiving the speaker offers to his father. The heteronormative obligation of the child, or the platonic ideal of the child as theorist Lee Edelman might describe, is a possibility denied to the unwell speaker. The reproduction of care outside of this mode is what accords to the speaker space to recover.

It would be too simplistic to regard the poems that close the collection as neatly concluding a narrative of recovery, even if they represent a shift to independent living and a return to poetry. Poems about poetry, perhaps. They dwell on autonomy, imagination and creation. The poem that precedes this section, 'White Noise', details how the speaker sleeps with "white noise" because he was afraid of silence, wherein "I could hear my thinking: the constant narration of how damaged I was." In the poem 'Time Travel', the speaker moves in with a friend. The speaker gets used to a new bathroom and light switches, starts using a cane, cannot remember numbers for prescriptions, and sleeps. "Sleep was a gap, a stutter in the sentence. Time was thick," he describes. As the speaker learns again to speak out loud, he prefers anterior sounds, or words he can "keep in the front of [his] mouth" rather than "back-of-the-throat words". The speaker's food cravings, favourite colours and sense of emotion all shift. In 'The Horns', the speaker describes his heartbroken housemate who has lost his girlfriend. The speaker describes sleeping, being exhausted by chores, and listening to his housemate sing songs of despair. Receiving care brings with it the unavoidability of a caregiver's proximity and pain.

Yet it is amidst these poems that poems containing a more distinct literary allusiveness return. In 'History', the speaker states:

Stevens had a blackbird. Stein had a rose. Thor had a hammer. He hammered in the morning. Plato had a cave. Noah had a boat. Jonah had a whale. Melville had a whale. Dumbo had a feather. Adam had a rib. Jacob had a ladder. Wittgenstein had a ladder. George Washington founded a nation. We gave him a dollar. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. We gave him five dollars. Harriet Tubman had a railroad. It wasn't an actual railroad.

The poem demonstrates the mechanics of free word association, albeit through the frame of the Western canon. American poetry, Norse mythology, Greek philosophy, Biblical narrative, American history. The poem 'Devonian Forest' makes reference to how the book of Genesis starts with the letter 'B' because it is "cautionary" and "primordial". "The beginning of a story is a dangerous place," the speaker declares. "The first noun makes a pledge, a mark on the ledger, and things begin their forward motion." It is the return of writing, metaphor and fictive settings replacing stark recollections of the present. The speaker describes "The land is covered in moss. The fish are still in the water, though they dream of legs."

'True Love' signals a reassertion of the metaphoric imagination. The speaker writes:

A dog bites down on a stick of dynamite and takes off running. They are going to explode together. Imagine: making someone feel like that, making them lose their mind like that. At the bars, I used a fake name. I was as blurry and undefinable as everyone else, equally afraid of being alone or being touched. […] A long time ago, maybe not so long, I knew a man who was slippery and morally flexible. I loved him. Sure, loved him. It lasted exactly as long as it was supposed to. I propose there is a man somewhere, chalk-faced in evening light, traveling furiously toward you—and the sun's going down, and his windows are open, and everything's coming over the horizon on cue.

The poem is arresting, juxtaposing images of violence and passion, loneliness and love. The speaker skirts the relationship between longing and anonymity, desire and harm. It is a representation of queerness that is inclined not to the lover at present, but the elusive possibility of a lover, or to quote scholar José Esteban Muñoz, "queerness [as] a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and tolling in the present".

Siken takes as the titles of many of the poems that close his collection literary terms. Take 'Fiction', for example. It begins:

I bet on red. I took it for a spin. I jawboned a tall tale and got penned in with the liars. I played the goat and kicked from shank of night 'till moonsink. It was mesmerizing. I told them about the river, how the canoe struck rock and the birch bark cracked. Boot by boot we shoveled water but our feet went cold and the boat sank.

The poem proceeds in media res. Gone are the close mappings to Siken's own life. The poem unfolds, still as a prose poem, but more elliptically, elusively, as if to toy with the expectation of a personal relation. Sonically, its opening brought to mind poet Atsuro Riley, his playfulness with verbal texture. Alliteration and assonance and strong consonants. Then in 'Nonfiction', the speaker asks the reader: "Tell me your life story, now I'm bored." Ostensibly, much of what preceded was non-fiction, though the poem asks that we lay this aside, briefly. Allusion returns. The speaker ends the poem:

Say it slant, see if it's possible. Distraction, diversion, the clumsy decorations? Cheap magic. A smoke screen. Without the truth there can be no fiction. Nonsense needs reason. To push against. I didn't howl at the moon, I yelled at a lamp. Subject verb. Someone wept. Some things are more important than poetry.

"Say it slant" paraphrases Emily Dickinson. "Some things are more important than poetry" recalls Danez Smith's poem 'anti poetica'. The return of allusion suggests a return from the immediacy of present description, perhaps a restoration of some elements of a previous style. Contrivance is explicitly highlighted as ornamentation. There is a tension between "nonsense" and "reason". The "nonsense" of the image yields a productive tension. The actual poem 'Poetry' details the speaker as a member of the Secret Service, but also as a robot singing "Beep, boop", an "impeccable camouflage". The undercover speaker evades detection in "an octopus costume". There is a playfulness here comparable to poets such as Chen Chen, a delight or joy that comes amidst the suffocations or challenges of the body, or a dismissal of the body. The speaker winks to the reader by saying, "I tell you this because I love you. I might be doing it all wrong."

The end of the collection brings again into focus the prose poem itself as the particular conduit for this phase of Siken's life in poetry. Where 'Line' had emphasised the fear of "[breaking] the line", 'Sentence' begins with the musing, "When does a line end? A line ends when it is broken. […] When does a sentence end? A sentence ends at the period." The sentence "flows like water" until the period arrives. Words are water, carrying the "debris of semicolons, parentheticals, and asides". The poem contains its own asides in parentheticals between round and square brackets. 'Paragraph' reflects the attempts of the speaker to "put it in a box". This, one assumes, is the paragraph. But it is "multiplicitous, in theory and practice". The speaker devotes effort to "the space between the thoughts". The poem diverges. "Once, I said restaurant nurse instead of waitress. It was good enough. The meaning survived," states the speaker. Meaning persists through the margins.

The poem 'Fauna' fully embraces metaphor, describing the speaker's "stepmother's father" as "an Elk" who would "butt heads with the other Elks". "The Elks fought in the war to end tyranny. They left, they fought, and they came back. They are not all right," the speaker recounts. The poem ends with the speaker declaring "We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide." Deer and elks are the frame by which the speaker contains a generational scar. In 'Dawn', the speaker wakes up in the dark, unsure of the time of day. The blurriness of perception induced by a stroke is obscured. The dawn has "An active emptiness. A background radiation." The speaker can look to the "mountains". "I stood there," he says, "waiting for it to start. I stood there for a long time." Imagery, device, technique, imprecision, the contrivance or artifice of poetry makes its return, in part, in the collection's final segment. This dovetails with the sense that a return to more overtly poetic techniques is indicative of the process of recovery.

The personal returns in 'Mountain'. Perhaps it is the poem that brings the collection's many concerns together by dispensing with metaphor. This provides a denouement to the depictions of paternal complication throughout. The speaker is "finally able to prove he was dead." The "he" is his father, or his "mother's ex-husband". The speaker can sell his condo. The speaker can have his ashes scattered. The ashes are scattered by "Andy". The speaker describes a "ghost" as "any number of things". A man "lies down in leaves" and sings a song that is "a mountain". The speaker describes an "availability to the world". The vulnerability "it takes for possible joy". The speaker diverts attention from the self, displacing it to an animal that "ran across the road". Perhaps the collection's conclusion is itself a description of recovery, the capacity for observation fully restored, the strength of metaphor fully present. I Do Know Some Things moved me, in and through questions of disability and caregiving. Placed in relation to Siken's past work, it is honest without self-indulgence, a witness to the clawing back to poetry experienced by as iconic a poet as any.

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