Richard Siken can’t help but love you. Supported by the scaffolding of the camera and the director’s chair, Crush, the author’s 2005 collection—selected by Louise Glück for the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award—demands your complicity. The speaker builds set after set and commands your presence within it:

We’re shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me

Spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls

right out of my mouth.

(“Dirty Valentine”)

I’m the director

and I’m screaming at you,

I’m waving my arms in the sky,

and everyone’s watching, everyone’s

curious, everyone’s

holding their breath.

(“Planet of Love”)

In the afterword for the 20th anniversary edition of Crush (since its publication, the collection has become revered, praised by such authors as Ocean Vuong and Dennis Cooper) published by Yale University Press in the spring of 2025, Siken revealed what was hiding behind the film camera and soundstage: the ravages of the AIDS epidemic. Siken wanted Crush’s jaggedly-enjambed lines “to let the intentionally unsaid things shimmer in the highly charged spaces.” He wanted the reader to reach in, to slide into a fictional skin, to partake of the eroticism and risk of his heart-swallowing scenes. The speaker loved you. What else would he need to explain?

There is no agency, no cause and effect, in Crush’s scenes—simply the narrator’s voice singing tragedy into the world: “Someone’s doing all the talking but no one’s lips move.” Driven by the fear of contamination, Crush’s speaker plays an obsessive game of genesis, re-crafting worlds for every poem. He bears witness to the sudden spillage of blood—“red light hemorrhaging from everywhere at once”—and refuses to name its source. In narrating violence unaffixed to a specific historical cause, Siken grants his metaphors ductility, allowing them to be stretched by the prying hands of readers. Rewriting script after script, Crush’s speaker shifts footing until his allusions shed the weight of their original referents. In the end, AIDS and Siken’s personal grief slough away, and what’s left is a parallel world where the origin of panic is much hazier, almost impossible to pin down.

The logic of Siken’s poems, in their inclusion of the camera and the director’s chair, mirrors fanfiction. And in classic fanfiction style, Crush’s speaker casts the second person as his tragic lover (insert “your name”).  Ironically, it was Crush’s admonition that readers to project themselves onto the text that gave rise to a seemingly inexhaustible demand for details about Siken’s life. Emboldened by Crush-fueled para-sociality, readers tried to resolve the distance between Siken’s persona and self: Did your boyfriend really die? How did it happen? I want to know: What did you mean by all this? In July 2023, Siken logged onto X and responded to a flood of inquiries with curt responses. “Shame on you. Shame shame shame,” he replied to someone asking if Crush was intended to be about the medical drama 9-1-1. He vacillated between disclosure and opacity: Crush, according to his posts, was at once deeply personal and imaginative, a fictional narrative of sorts about a character named Henry.

Twenty years later, a new collection of poems by Siken has been published, too. If Crush was a work of near intimacy clouded by questions of what was “real,” then I Do Know Some Things (128 pages; Copper Canyon Press), a finalist for a 2025 National Book Award, is an act of true intimacy, creating a space where poet and reader can meet at last. This time, there is no confusion about the speaker of the poems’ lyric I. Using dictation software to craft his lines aloud, the Siken of I Do Know Some Things turns Miltonic, weaving the cold clarity of his Twitter and afterword voice into verse.

Across seven sprawling sections, Siken divulges the autobiographical truth that readers have spent decades trying to discern. The first poems from I Do Know Some Things delve into family history: divorced parents, funerals, and denied inheritances. Poetry seeps inevitably out of the mundane, gleaming amid the detritus of Siken’s family home. When the Health Department refuses a death certificate for his stepfather, Siken knows that the house “isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts.” Bureaucracy’s absurd demands, in Siken’s mouth, turn into a vision of the afterlife: “When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the / landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for / me.”

Where Crush buried grief under the layers of movie sets and dreamscapes, I Do Know Some Things gives it to us straight. In “Sidewalk,” the speaker  recounts the first onslaught of stroke-induced numbness: “I felt like I was running / to him but I wasn’t moving. The trees were tall and fast outside the / car window.” Faced with Siken’s ambiguous, slippery language, the doctors see Siken only as the dishonest poet. At his most vulnerable, Siken faces, yet again, the reader’s question of narratorial reliability. The doctor demands more evidence for a diagnosis. But the fact of Siken’s body acts as an undeniable sounding alarm: “slack and crooked, the two sides of my face moving at different speeds,” “half of me mostly numb.” Between the nurse’s disbelief and his dismissal from the hospital, Siken slots in a simple “I do know some things”—the title of his collection emerging like a sigh.

Siken notes in an interview with BOMB that I Do Know Some Things started as a personal rehabilitation project after his stroke in 2019, as “exercises to put [him] back together.” All the hyperbole at craft talks might just be right: I Do Know Some Things is evidence that poetry can serve as a literal means of survival. “This shoe, the coat—if you can’t find the word, you can still describe it,” he notes in a poem titled “Paragraph.” By laying down sentence after sentence like bricks, Siken eventually arrives at a reconstructed speech.

For Siken, recovery is laborious and painful. “It makes me uncomfortable, my story—part insight, part anecdote—started by unreliable people at cross-purposes,” he admits in “Hearsay.” As he tries to determine a new ethic of writing, Siken exhibits a sharp self-consciousness around his former work, confessing and doubling back, tripping up and asking for the reader’s forgiveness. In “Devonian Forest,” Siken wades through a warped, self-created Eden until the holes reveal themselves: “I thought that I could write / it down and then erase it if I had to but it left a hole. It didn’t / track. The incongruities betrayed me. The trail fades, the clearing / evaporates.” Confronted with the missing clearing, the myth of the origin—of Siken’s ability to remain within the fictive worlds of Crush—falls apart.

But I Do Know Some Things is not interested in a full recovery. Siken’s meticulously constructed Eden has fallen, and there’s no use in returning to it. Instead, I Do Know Some Things shines the most in its humility. In simply inviting the reader—and all of their hunger for identification—into his memories, Siken makes his greatest gesture of readerly love. “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,” he confesses plainly in “Cover Story.” Here is the source of Crush’s car crash, the hairpin-turn, the director’s chair, told without distraction.

It is brave of Siken to drag the reader so close to himself and not flinch. Take the last lines of Crush: “My applejack, / my silent night, just mash your lips against me. / We are all going forward. None of us are going back.” Despite Crush’s bravado, the kiss itself never occurred. The speaker, ever self-conscious, had long barreled past the moment, already entering the next morning. Siken’s voice in I Do Know Some Things is interested in recovering the event itself. Forget mashing lips. Siken has pulled us into the most intimate act of all—bearing witness to his body of memory.

Ashley Wang is a writer from Hong Kong. She studies English and German at Yale.