No modern poet​ has had a career quite like Richard Siken’s. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror America, pursued kinky gay sex, impulsive violence, ‘names of poisons, names of/handguns’, ‘street names and place names’ and ‘clothes clinging/nipple to groin’. The long or awkward lines and blocks of prose poetry – less Louise Glück (who picked the book for the prize) than C.K. Williams or even Ted Hughes – split the difference between gritty lyric and speedy erotica, or maybe drove one, like a classic Camaro in a 3 a.m. drag race, right into the other.

‘Driving, Not Washing’ envisions ‘two boys striking out across America’, ‘hurling their bodies down the freeway/to the smell of gasoline’, with ‘angels rising from their little dens … swarming over the grassland’, ‘dropping their white-hot bombs of love’. The longest sequence in Crush, a set of prose poems titled ‘You Are Jeff’, goes even further in scrambling sex with violence and childhood memories with action movies. It features ‘twins on motorbikes’: ‘They are the same and they hate each other for it.’ One twin – or maybe a third party, ‘the Devil’, ‘played by two men’ – ‘invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back … When he throws the wrench into the air it will catch the light.’

‘We are still, all of us, in the shadow of [Crush],’ the poet Richie Hofmann wrote after Yale reissued the book in a 20th-anniversary edition last year. Glück told Hofmann that long after Crush won the Yale prize, submissions for the award were ‘all just Siken imitations’. He won the prize at the age of 37, after years as a social worker for developmentally disabled adults in Tucson, Arizona. It probably helped both his work and his reception that he seemed to come out of nowhere, far from elite universities and their forcing-house norms.

Crush hit hard because young readers wanted what it offered: blood and sex, hot guys and trauma, bedsheets and crime scenes and open defiance, in a nation where school shootings already seemed normal but gay marriage (except in one deep-blue state) remained illegal. Many readers also saw in the book’s sexy brothers and demons and gunshot wounds de facto fan fiction for the TV show Supernatural, with its hard-driving, demon-hunting brothers.

Writing in 2015, the journalist Adam Carlson called Siken ‘the poet laureate of fan fiction’. Siken would later write fanfic (about the TV show Sherlock), though he reminded Carlson that ‘Crush was accepted for publication before Supernatural aired … Crush and Supernatural are products of a cultural moment, not products of each other.’ The Archive of Our Own, a leading website for fan fiction, now holds almost 300,000 works based on Supernatural, several using lines from Crush (you can search the site for the phrase ‘Inspired by Richard Siken’). Crush itself has since made an appearance on the popular teen drama series Heartstopper; in the second season, a character is shown reading from the book at a friend’s sixteenth birthday party.

Siken’s second collection, War of the Foxes (2015), abandoned B-movies, open roads and firearms for art galleries and four-legged mammals: ‘I erased my legs and forgot to draw in the stilts,’ one sonnet begins. ‘Sometimes I draw you with fangs. I tell you these/things because I love you.’ The poems in this volume sought quieter intimate scenes, with fewer thrills and fewer shocks. ‘We smuggled ourselves into ourselves,’ Siken says in ‘Landscape with Black Coats in Snow’. ‘We left footprints in the slush of ourselves.’ Sometimes the poet seems stuck, neither delicate nor vigorous, but uncomfortably indecisive: ‘There were boxes in my head and I moved them/around, pretended it changed something./It didn’t work.’ At least he wasn’t trying to write Crush 2.

And then Siken couldn’t write – or speak – at all. In early 2019, he had a stroke and had to learn to move, speak, write, recognise and remember all over again. By 2020, he was publishing poems once more, but they didn’t sound like anything from his previous books. All in prose, they strung together sentences about the parts of his life he could, sometimes, recall, using the English he had slowly reacquired, and pursuing the understated astonishment, or surprise, or even confusion, that now accompanied his use of language.

His new book, I Do Know Some Things (Chatto, £12.99), collects these prose poems. They’re direct, moving, disquieting and almost never sexy. Rather, they ask us to respect our limits, and Siken’s: ‘It’s a small window, the span of time in which we get to say what we know.’ The verse line – meant for overlapping parts, gaps and incomplete interpretations – doesn’t serve someone who has to work hard to complete any utterance. ‘The sentence goes one way, the line goes another,’ he writes in a poem called ‘Line’. ‘I wouldn’t break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was already broken.’ ‘After my stroke,’ Siken told an interviewer, ‘I was going to measure my progress by my ability to make a paragraph, to convey a single thought completely.’

If that’s the measure, then the new book fails: no page holds just one thought. Instead each paragraph takes us determinedly from one thought to the next, one attempt to re-enter the world through speech and then another, like steps on a balance beam. ‘I said it as plain as I could,’ Siken writes near the end of the volume. ‘If you can’t find the word, you can still describe it. Once, I said restaurant nurse instead of waitress. It was good enough. The meaning survived.’ If he wouldn’t set out to find metaphors, metaphors would find him.

Siken’s new, flattened style is made up of painstaking, slow-moving sentences and isolated words: ‘Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder … Describing the world was easier than finding a place in it.’ ‘Sidewalk’ reimagines the stroke itself. Later he laments, but cannot avoid, ‘the constant narration of how damaged I was’. Many of the poems take place in hospital rooms, in cars, at home, at frustrating check-ups familiar to anyone who has been, or accompanied, a patient with chronic needs. A nurse pushes Siken’s wheelchair without asking and he defends himself: ‘I scolded her … I am the shithead who is doing laps in his wheelchair. I am the shithead who has a philosophy about how people should be treated even if they can’t remember anything.’

I Do Know Some Things is not just a set of prose poems but a book about disability advocacy. Siken’s new work shows him coming to terms with his changed body: ‘I wanted to defend my new self from my old self. I didn’t want to be him anymore. You live on this side now.’ The term ‘disability gain’ refers to the strengths or capacities that can arise from disabled experience. (Many blind people, for example, experience heightened hearing or smell.) Siken’s new style may be a form of disability gain. If, as he proposes, ‘style is how you compensate for what you can’t do,’ then new compensation implies a new style. A poet who once used language to rip the world apart now sees the way simple words can put it together.

The book tracks this process, not step by step, or month by month, but through single realisations, breakthrough moments and dissolving anecdotes. Some show Siken recalling – after a kind of radio silence – lines from other poets: ‘Something Bright, Then Holes’ is a Maggie Nelson poem; ‘a man somewhere, chalk-faced in evening light, travelling furiously towards you’ alludes to Ashbery’s ‘At North Farm’. At other times, Siken describes his damaged brain and body as a long-wounded civilisation: ‘All over town pipes are still bursting in houses that are no longer there. When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history.’

At a cursory glance, the spare prose blocks of I Do Know Some Things may not seem to qualify as poems at all. Read the book through carefully, though, and the reason becomes obvious. For every handful of sentences that lead us in a seemingly straightforward way through Siken’s day-to-day world, another sentence points sideways, up, backwards or into the ether. From ‘Piano Lesson’: ‘If a harp lay down and fell asleep and you bludgeoned its dreams with felted hammers then you would have a piano. If you were wearing a tuxedo, you would have a grand piano.’ From ‘Fear’: ‘I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller.’ If lyric poems compose a kind of substitute body, then Siken, as he negotiates his disability, needs the alternative bodies shaped by poems as much as anyone can.

The book gives special attention to voice and to the way words sound. ‘I used the words I could keep in the front of my mouth: quick, this, yes,’ Siken writes of beginning speech therapy. ‘The back-of-the-throat words made me queasy. Grease, glaze, sing. Phlegm, plague, Baton Rouge … I didn’t like the reminder: This is your body, your stupid body. I didn’t want to be in this body, to make these sounds.’ Choosing labials and sibilants over palatals and dentals, Siken turns inside-out the goal that scholars and avant-gardists, from Roman Jakobson to Ron Silliman, have long attributed to modern poetry – highlighting the material aspects of words. I Do Know Some Things uses that material not to break out of a shared social world, but to find a way back in. ‘I said black tree when I meant night. I said The branches blow and we sleep in dirt.’ These substitutions sound neat, but it would be neater if he could also choose to say ‘night’. Or ‘death’. Or ‘wind’. ‘What had made things follow had come apart and the coming apart was no longer interesting.’

The poems consider not just the physical work of speech therapy but the memory work of psychotherapy and emotional recovery. A poem called ‘Pornography’ reconstructs the experience of watching, or maybe working on, an erotic film: ‘I want to be them. I want to be like them. I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched … The cameraman is standing very quietly. It looks like he is weeping.’ He might have been reading Crush.

Other poems in I Do Know Some Things examine memories from Siken’s difficult childhood. ‘At dinner, my grandmother would serve us white meat on plates, then turn her back to us and eat dark meat and gizzards over the stove, out of the pan.’ ‘Kitchen Window’ recalls other unnerving adults: ‘Several men were not my father.’ One such man, a friend’s stepfather, detects in the speaker ‘the wariness one learns from being neglected – eating too fast, being overly grateful, always knowing who was in the house’. ‘Family Therapy’ opens: ‘The morning after my father killed his first wife, he woke up next to her dead body, rose from their bed, and began his morning routine.’ Figural or literal murder? Siken (at least within the book) doesn’t say.

In a poem called ‘Parataxis’, Siken writes about his ‘housemate’s girlfriend’s kid’, who ‘stays with us half the week’, ‘eats sugared cereal and cheese sandwiches, like the rest of us, but he has to use plastic cups and plates because he is clumsier than I am. It doesn’t matter. When the dishes are safe the toy rocketships break apart.’ Children have certain affinities with disabled adults: there’s so much they can’t do. But children also possess abilities adults lack. They sometimes find safety in failure: when their rockets crash nobody dies; they also ‘insist on possibility in the face of grown-ups and the pumice of their compromises’.

Siken’s new style resembles the musically alert prose of writers such as Amy Hempel or Lydia Davis. The terse realism of the poem ‘Desk Clerk’ is reminiscent of early Joan Didion: ‘In the morning, during brunch, the ambulance pulled silently into the parking lot. The silence is worse than the flashing and the noise. It means there is no need to rush.’ When Didion declared ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ she meant that we lie to ourselves all the time. But Siken, in the recovery that his prose poems chart, cannot lie: his life is a box of pieces he has to name and pick up and put together. Of course the poems are shaped like boxes too.

What comes next? According to Siken, the poet of Crush is gone. ‘I don’t really recover,’ he told another interviewer. ‘There are things I will just never be able to do again. And that’s fine.’ Whatever his process of non-recovery is, that process has fashioned a new and valuable writer, one who could not have come into being without the stroke, or without having first written Crush. ‘I remember things that might have been you and I remember things I thought were you and I remember things that weren’t you, that were actually me,’ he explains, in one of the many poems in the new book that describe the process of writing. ‘Identity is self-defence.’ These poems show the way he built himself back up, and let the world back in.