Richard Siken
“Poetry is an example of how to be human. And I believe poetry is the language of the imagination. And we need larger imaginations. Figurative language reframes problems and offers previously unseen solutions. It challenges as well as delights. Poetry should be everyone’s second language.”
“An absolute feat.”
“A kaleidoscope of memory, language and identity that reveals - or revels - in the faultiness of our own narratives…this is a virtuosity of candor and technique, bound by a seemingly effortless linguistic choreography.”
“Siken’s intensity still throbs between sentences…deft and exciting.”
“This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you.”
““Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency.”
“cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”
“Vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope, [Siken’s] verse offers sharply observed vignettes of longing, love, and pain.”
Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His third collection of poems, I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon, 2025) is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon, 2022), a Lannan Literary Selection, and Crush (Yale University Press, 2005), winner of multiple awards including the Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected by Louise Glück, the LAMBDA Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award from Publishing Triangle. Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In an interview, Siken was asked about how to make poetry a more common part of life, and how that desire informs his choices when writing or deciding what to poems to release into the world: “For whatever reason, people come away from their first encounters with poetry deciding that they don’t understand poetry, and that perhaps it isn’t something worth understanding. And those willing to give it a chance are impatient and stingy with their time. So, what can we do? Give them candy, lots of candy. Go heavy on the front end. Delete the wind-up and the pitch and start with the crack of the bat. Give them image and music. Give them delight and surprise and swerve. You have to lock them in at the beginning or they won’t follow you. And you can’t let it sag or falter. You need multiple propulsions. You need the new propulsion already in place before you let go of the current one. People will go to great lengths to avoid feeling difficult things so you have to reward them for putting up with the discomfort. People have limited attention, limited bandwidth, so you have to cut every dead word and every false gesture. It has to be relentless and inevitable. It has to be economical and precise. And, above all, it has to be compressed.”
Richard Siken lives in Tucson.
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Book Jacket
