​I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is a collection of poems in which the speaker documents his stroke, his time in the hospital, and his reflections on family and life. The language is sharp and cutting, and because they’re all prose poems, it is the language that holds each one up. There were so many poems I was affected by that I would just be listing off the table of contents if I were to say which ones I liked. However, there was one poem that I reread because of how piercing it is. This poem is, ‘Redshift’, in which the speaker describes a house being on fire for six years, and a man beating his wife, “…all night, the same night…” It highlights how trauma can be unseen, its recurrence, and that no matter where you stand, there will always be pain somewhere. In one of my favorite lines of the collection, the speaker observes, “When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and / everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history.” What exists consumes and what consumes cannot be avoided. The collection is deeply haunting in how the speaker is frank about his family, his past lovers, and the stroke that invariably changed his world. An essential read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection about a man and the loss of his lover to AIDs, how it felt to be queer in the 90s, and the violence tied to those moments. The language is piercing, volatile, and propulsive in a way that physically plays out through the line breaks and white spaces. The language too, with the recurrence of blood and death, creates a sense of foreboding that blankets the whole collection. I was particularly drawn to poems such as, ‘Scheherazade’, ‘Visible World’, ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’, and ‘Straw House, Straw Dog’. This violence that is tied to homophobia is so intensely described in ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’ in which a boy confesses his love to another boy and is then nearly drowned, kickstarting a life of hookups and lovers where both people force violence onto each other. The speaker says, “You try to warn him, you tell him/you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,” and, “You take the things you love/and tear them apart/or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.” There’s a softness too that the speaker allows the reader to see for just a brief moment. At the end of the poem ‘You are Jeff”, the speaker’s lover reaches over and touches his hand while driving and the speaker says, “and you feel your/heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you/don’t even have a name for.” This in part relating back to the poem obsessing over names provides a grandiosity to the whole collection. I can see why this collection has withstood the test of time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5