Nikolai Duffy sifts through some of the very best recent poetry

Richard Siken rose to prominence in 2004 with the publication of his award-winning collection Crush, a book that not only received critical acclaim but proved to be hugely popular with readers, conferring on its poet cult status in the US. Ten years later, Crush was followed by Siken’s second collection, War of the Foxes. Both of those books were rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry. Formally, I Do Know Some Things (Chatto & Windus, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69) is very different: it is an extra ordinary and deeply affecting collection of 77 prose poems written in the aftermath of a major stroke that left Siken paralysed on one side, lacking short-term memory and struggling with language. “I was having trouble,” he writes, “with my tenses – is, was, will be – and things were getting lost in the overlap.” In an interview, Siken has explained that he turned to prose because he wanted to measure his recovery against the ability to articulate complete sentences, to build what he refers to in the poem “Doubt” as “an encyclopedia of myself”. At its heart, I Do Know Some Things is an unflinching, disquieting poetic memoir that charts Siken’s stroke, hospitalisation, medical bureaucracy and, ultimately, his fragile recovery. It is also a book about care, how we care for ourselves and how we care for each other. Highly recommended.

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