I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is a nominated poetry book for the 2025 National Book Awards. Every year I attempt to read a minimum of the nominated books before the award is announced in November. This year I selected this poetry book by Siken because of the committee's description:
Richard Siken writes his way through the aftermath of a stroke—recovering language, memories, and his sense of self in the process. Through 77 autobiographical prose poems, I Do Know Some Things accepts the limitations of memory and the potential liberation of unreliable narration in rewriting one’s own story (NBA).
Doesn't that sound interesting? I thought so. From the very first prose poem I knew I was in for something unique, too. The thing about prose poems is they often just seem like writing. Where is the poetry, I wondered? In fact at one point I even wondered how the NBA committee selected this as poetry and then I stumbled into "Several Tremendous" which begins with:
---angel of crowning and angel of breaching, angel of leavening, angel of grieving, angel of elbow, angel of bright, angel ot terrible, monster of terrible; music and terrible, a big small music and several terrible tremendous; ... (22).
Ah. I finally recognize the poetry. But honestly I didn't keep reading for the poems, I kept reading for the story. It is the story of Richard Siken's life both before and after the stroke and his childhood trauma, which was still traumatic. His troubles getting help during his stroke and care afterwards. His struggle with language and with his memory. Imagine losing your memory for words and as you regain the meanings behind words, you also regain the memories of your unhappy childhood. How awful.
I've said this before on my blog: I am not a very sophisticated poetry reader. I am used to reading fiction and narrative nonfiction. When I read poetry I always find myself reading the poems as if they are true and I always want to know more about the story the poem is telling. But often the story details are hidden behind metaphors and other literary devices. In I Do Know SomeThings all of that is gone and and the reader comes face to face with the poet himself. In an interview with the Adroit Journal, Siken says this:
My new book is seventy-seven prose poems. Each page is a small box that tries to hold the content. I also lost my guile and poker face from the stroke. I couldn’t lie and I didn’t have a filter. The artifice was gone. I was saying things without metaphor, which was shocking and uncomfortable. I was speaking in the first-person, not making the reader complicit with the second-person or using the third-person to throw my voice. And most terrifying for me: the content was autobiographical. All of this forced me to lean on new craft strategies. I use associative leaps significantly now, to keep the poems moving and make interesting hinges. All the poems look the same. I needed strategies to make them sound different... I have a rhythm but the music—the lyric—isn’t there in the way it was before (Adroit Journal).
I know most of my readers will gloss over this review since poetry is not your usual genre and this poetry, prose poetry, is even more unusual. But I urge you to take a minute and reconsider. Prose poetry is reading prose and this poet writes with no artifice. It is like really a fascinating, if not heartbreaking, memoir. I commend the NBA committee for nominating it for their award in poetry and I honestly hope it wins.
My rating: 4.25 stars.
-Anne
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