Paperback of the week: I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

In 2004, Richard Siken won the Yale Younger Poets prize with his collection Crush. Published the following year, it went on to sell 100,000 copies – a huge number for a poetry debut. Characterised by its passion, torment and heady beauty, it had a profound effect on a generation of American poets. More surprising was its viral online life, Tumblr users in particular taking Siken’s words, decontextualising them (and, poets look away now), removing the line breaks and turning them into memes.

Seven years ago, a stroke left Siken “not just broken but fundamentally struck-through”: paralysed on his right side, lacking a short-term memory and struggling to express himself verbally. Those line breaks – the method by which, as he describes it, “meaning becomes a chord, not a single note” – were beyond him, so he began working in a simpler form: the paragraph.

The resulting book, Siken’s third collection, contains 77 poems set like prose, most under a page in length. Their subject matter includes messy family legacies, mental breakdowns, cults, sex, the medical establishment and murder. In their propulsiveness, narrative strategies and image-making, they are frequently startling. I found the book difficult to put down, and when it was finished I soon wanted to return.

It operates on three interweaving levels: the stroke and Siken’s recovery; defining moments from his life, such as making soup with his grandmother, the death of a lover, an unsuccessful attempt to latch on to a family more stable than his own; and more abstract pieces about art and aesthetics.

This last category includes a trilogy on units of writing (Line, Sentence, Paragraph) that demonstrates how exhilarating it can be to ride pillion behind Siken’s thought process: “Until the period, the sentence flows like water, seeking its own level, moving forward relentlessly – sometimes in a fast run past a tight curve, laminar with little words and clipped thoughts as it races toward the tiny falls that change the slope of the stream to a drop; or it jumps around in short, sharp bursts, choppy over the rocks, the commas, turbulent, the rapids throwing spray, here, there, rampageous, ungovernable.”

The nakedly confessional tone of the poems in Crush led readers to take it for autobiography, and Siken to feel his storytelling talent was being overlooked. In I Do Know Some Things we see this situation reversed when, after his stroke, a friend drives him to hospital. “All my answers were stroke, dizzy, numb,” he writes in Sidewalk. “I kept saying the words in different ways so [the nurse] would understand. She didn’t. She didn’t believe me. They put me in the waiting room, which I knew was wrong, and I realised that I had messed it up because I didn’t call for an ambulance.”

Artful as the inversion is – fact taken for story where once story was taken for fact – the new collection is entirely autobiographical: “I don’t lie in these poems,” Siken told an interviewer, “which is new for me and makes me very uncomfortable.” In Cover Story he even corrects the record regarding the lover whose death informed Crush: “My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography. He died on Christmas Day, 1990, when his family disconnected the mechanical breathing machine.”

In her foreword to Crush, Louise Glück writes that, “because of the poems’ interconnectedness, the temptation has been to quote everything”. A similar problem applies to I Do Know Some Things, its effects often more cumulative than instantaneous. The sense grows that time is short and death near, but there’s as much beauty as horror in the fact. In Strata, one of the closing poems, Siken writes: “We rise into language for only so long before we fall back down into silence. It’s a small window, the span of time in which we get to say what we know.”

I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is published by Chatto & Windus (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Paola Valenzuela