I turned in sleep, shouldering into the dark, glossy water.

I started new dreams without finishing the last, sifting in sleep what I couldn’t sift in daylight.
― Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things

Music was too much to handle. It was overwhelming, but I was afraid of the silence. In the silence, I could hear my thinking: the constant narration of how damaged I was.
― Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things

After meds, I realized I was just another empath in a Denny’s, sinking onion rings in ranch dressing in the middle of the night.
― Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things

This was tough. It’s not like the other Richard Siken collection Crush is an easy read, but it is alive in the “set myself on fire to stay warm” sense. I Do Know Some Things is about clawing one’s way back to life one excruciating step at a time. It explores the meaning of identity when one cannot trust one’s body or one’s own memory.

Published twenty years after Crush, I Do Know Some Things describes the visceral and alienating experience of having a stroke and of everything that comes after. Siken recounts his scattered thought process of dragging himself to the front of his apartment building so his friend could find him and drive him to the hospital, ultimately avoiding the cost of an ambulance. He describes how he had to learn to use a walker so he could move about a shared studio space and get to his cot in the small office there. He explains that he chose to live there instead of in his rented garage apartment because at least in the noisy, occupied studio, he would not be alone like he was during his first stroke. He describes what it feels like to wake up and know where you are and who you are, but to have a body that is unresponsive. To talk to doctors again and again and for the pain and disorientation and numbness to never improve, but instead evolve into some other new disturbing sensation.

All of this is told in his unflinching, straightforward manner. Between the poems about recovery, languishing, and his very painful but relatable identity crisis, Siken shares snippets of his life growing up. Of his father’s narcissistic behavior and his mother’s ambivalence. Of his relationship with his half brother and how one deals with the death and resulting bureaucracy of burying an estranged parent alongside a half-sibling who is also a stranger.

Content warnings for mention of suicide, controlling relationships, substance abuse, and child neglect.