If I Was Undercover Now I Wouldn’t Say

C. Francis Fisher investigates Richard Siken’s “I Do Know Some Things.”

By C. Francis FisherAugust 26, 2025

• Poetry

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN we lose the thread? The knowledge of how things fit together makes us human. Object permanence, trusting that someone or something is there even when we cannot see them, is an important developmental stage in childhood. Continuity is such a cornerstone of human life that we have fairy tales and myths warning us what happens when it goes wrong: Hansel and Gretel in the forest leaving a trail of crumbs; Theseus’ thread in the Minotaur’s maze.

Richard Siken’s third poetry collection, I Do Know Some Things, rewrites these obsessions with continuity. Siken experienced a level of fame for his first book Crush, which was selected in 2004 by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, that most poets never achieve. It is a cult classic and many readers’ gateway drug or only foray into contemporary poetry.

I first read Crush on my kitchen floor. I had just started seeing the person who lent me the book. I finished it in an hour, cried, and started over. I read the book three times that first sitting. I was 22. The propulsion of the book lies, certainly, in the breakneck speed of love and loss the speaker experiences. But the poems also flesh out across the pages, using the whole space, spooling messily toward the margins. The line break is a key method of meaning-making in the book. “Driving, Not Washing,” for example, ends:

     It should follow,
             you know this, like the panels of a comic strip,
                        we should be belted in, but you still can’t get beyond your skin,
     and they’re trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything
                                                                                                                        walks away.

“Walks away” sits there on its own line, upping the emotional drama. There is a manipulation to the line break evident here. Manipulation gets a bad rap, but I don’t mean it in a negative way. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines manipulation as “to handle, esp. with skill or dexterity; to turn, reposition, reshape.” Siken’s Crush abounds in gorgeous manipulation. Still, the use of line breaks to activate the reader’s emotions can also run the risk of being a quick fix, a hit.

Siken seems to be aware of the ways in which he heightened the emotional state of Crush. On Twitter, he spent time “in 2018 […] sass[ing] the sikenbot.” The bot quoted his poem “Little Beast”: “But damn if there isn’t anything sexier / than a slender boy with a handgun, / a fast car, a bottle of pills.” Siken responds, “The handgun is no longer sexy. Also, we can skip the pills. And really, slender is over-rated. So basically a car. And it doesn’t have to go that fast.”

This tweet illustrates Siken’s level of self-awareness in relation to his earlier writing. In interviews, he shares how much readers identified him with the speaker of Crush and believed the book to be both factual and autobiographical. These pressures influenced his second collection, War of the Foxes (2015), which relies on myth to build distance between the poet and the speaker. Then, in 2019, Siken had a major stroke. In terms of form and content, this medical event is the impetus for his new book, I Do Know Some Things.

This collection features 77 prose poems broken into seven sections of 11 poems each. There is a regularity to the prose poem, a need to fit complex ideas and feeling into a box that is contained, not by the writer but by the artificial structures of a computer’s word processor. These evenly distributed sections reflect a similar impulse—a compulsion for containment and uniformity. It is an absolute feat that Siken creates such a compelling and wide-ranging book from the single form.

Interviewed by Thomas Hobohm for The Adroit Journal, Siken explained: “When I had my stroke, I lost my sense of line. I lost my music. A line break makes a hitch in the breath, a small crack in the meaning. I was trying to piece things back together and the line break was making it harder, not easier. I had to abandon it.” From the beginning, the collection weaves together poems that address family and childhood with the experiences of his stroke. Having lost his memory and sense of self, Siken uses the poem to recreate an identity through storytelling that spans his early years, later familial interactions, and the traumatic experience of surviving a major stroke.

In order to create an emotional landscape without the use of line breaks, Siken relies on humor. He reverses readerly expectations in the collection’s first poem, “Real Estate,” in which he writes: “My mother married a man who divorced her for money.” To begin the collection with the maternal stakes a claim that continues throughout the book: we are not people made in a vacuum but are shaped, rather, by those in our lives, chosen and not. The poem goes on: “When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him.” “These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it, I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department.” Here, the language of the spiritual and the language of the state are the same. As readers, we are taught that this speaker cannot rely on these institutions to fabricate a new sense of self. Religion and bureaucracy let him down in equal measure.

Without these social structures, how can we understand ourselves? While Siken’s experience of self-making is an extreme case due to stroke-related memory loss, he points to the way identity formation is also everyone’s reality. In “Hearsay,” he writes, “They say that I was born in February, in a hospital in Midtown, while it snowed. It is legend. There are photographs.” He goes on to ask, “What does it take to own the myth? Why build a self from this?” In this way, Siken allows the collection to be both deeply personal and particular, as the story of a man recovering from a horribly disruptive and tragic medical event, and relatable to any reader—how can we know that the stories that originate with family and caretakers are true?

In a post on X two summers ago, Siken writes that these “prose poems [are] about what [he] can remember about [his] life. It is autobiographical. A backstage pass.” In some ways, this collection is the poetic equivalent of autofiction, the popular genre represented by Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014–18) or Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009–11) that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. As readers, must we take the writer at their word? What does this trend say about our current moment—put another way, what has left us so desperate for biographical intimacy, for the unfiltered truth?

Siken is well aware of the questionable status of truth, our desire for it, and its impossibility. We all want the truth—about ourselves, the lives of others—but does such a thing exist when we are often, as he says, unreliable “people at cross-purposes”? In “Cover Story,” he addresses this head-on, writing, “My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography.” How can a lie, the opposite of truth, become part of the public record? If you say something long and loud enough it will become the truth—especially when no one else cares. Siken takes these transformations full-circle—announcing the lie that became the truth, turning it once again into a lie by telling the truth. This twilight zone of fact and fiction extends to other aspects of the poems: “I drove in the darkness between the accident and dawn,” he writes, and feeling becomes a tangible place.

Why choose poetry to tell this story and not, for example, memoir? In “Patty Melt,” something like an answer begins to present itself. The speaker recounts the story of accompanying his estranged mother to his grandmother’s funeral. She calls to say, “I know we’re not talking but I need you to keep me from dancing on her grave.” But in the end, “there was nothing to celebrate or protest, just a hole in the ground with a box in it and no real way to prove a point or turn the afternoon into spectacle.” At the end of the poem, the subject shifts to the mother’s death: “I was still in a wheelchair when my mother died. I had her cremated. There was nowhere to put the box.” As readers, we feel entrusted with the true secret of the poet’s life, but this sense of transparency is an illusion. The vulnerability of the speaker has its limits. For example, at this point in the loose narrative, we do not know why he is in a wheelchair. Again and again, we are reminded that we are only let in on the parts of a life a writer wants to share. Even the autobiographical is constructed. Poetry invites our continuous questioning, including the question of what is true. As Siken writes in the poem titled “Poetry”: “If I was undercover now I wouldn’t say.”

I Do Know Some Things is an argument with the world. The defiant title challenges those who question the speaker, the writer, and the space between the two where the book exists. As we read on, the patient heals from his stroke. In “Zeno,” he writes,

All roads lead to Rome but Zeno says we’ll never get there. The law of diminishing returns—always advancing in smaller increments. Similarly, all roads lead away from Rome. It is a necessary requirement. I will heal, but not completely. Always approaching, never arriving.

Siken pulls unexpected meaning from a common phrase—of course the roads must also lead away from the famed city. It’s as if the poet has pulled a rock aside to reveal the bugs living underneath. Both realities are equally true, but the rock gets more of our attention. Similarly, his recovery from the stroke focuses on improvements rather than the dark reality of healing: that one will never be the same as before.

Siken is certainly not the same as before, but the changes are hard-earned. The work here is shown. The thread was lost, or cut, then woven back together by the poet’s own grit and love for the medium. He could not go on and yet here he is, going on. The book’s emotional landscape is denser than in Siken’s earlier work, at once more autobiographical and more difficult to parse. There is truth and lie, myth and reality; perhaps it is all truth because we need to say it. After all, “the future doesn’t just happen, it gets built. See what you can get away with. Identity is self-defense. I defended myself.”