I spent the majority of my teenage years with Richard Siken's Crush on my bedside table. I would read it, finish it, and then leave it there, to begin again the next night. I was also almost entirely socially and romantically isolated until adulthood—I did not yet know how it truly felt to drive one's body into another's like a crash-test car, or to walk into a bar and say make it a double. But Siken wrote with a cadence that, for once, aligned with the urgency I felt everything carried in my youthful head. I did know how it felt to want someone so badly that the weight of it nearly pressed you into dust. He made it something I could wrap my head around.

Today I am almost twenty-one and I am still a child. I, too, now know some things, but as I have aged so has Siken—I do not know how it feels to suffer a stroke, forgetting how to perform all the necessary human functions and having to relearn what words mean, how to harness control. I Do Know Some Things is an extremely different book from both Crush and War of the Foxes. Where lines were once meticulously arranged on the page, they have now abruptly changed forms: now falling in tight blocks of text, it is in your hands to put the pieces together and take them apart. The book's back-cover synopsis goes on about bravery. In some sense, I disagree with its sentiment—as a writer, I do not think it is brave to write about the intensely personal, nor do I think it is brave to return to writing as a form of parsing it. If poetry and prose are what you want, this is second nature. I do, however, think it takes bravery to recognize that one's hold on reality has loosened, and to forgo structure accordingly. It takes acceptance. For a poet, this is hardly a natural impulse at all.