там и тогда

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“Where was he, the one who remembered who I was?” – from “Doubt”

Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book. Even without an exclamation mark, the book’s title, I Do Know Something, handwritten in capital letters across the solid black front cover, suggests that the poet really means business. Then open the book and stare for a moment at the bright red endpapers, a detail from an artwork by Cecil Touchon called “Post Dogmatist Painting #934” (2017). Touchon’s piece depicts portions of large white letters of the alphabet, jumbled up and overlapping each other, so that the symbols of communication have become mute sculptural shapes, as if Robert Indiana’s famous “Love” sculpture had come tumbling down.

The poems in this, his third book, are all written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out between the first word and the last. No enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s singular, captivating voice. The title sentence comes from the book’s fifth poem, “Sidewalk,” in which Siken tells of turning up at a local hospital, sure that he is having a stroke, but no one there will believe him. The doctor tells him he is having a panic attack and sends him home. Five poems later, in “Metonymy,” a poem of staccato short sentences and phrases, a friend finally insists he call an ambulance and go to different hospital, where it is immediately recognized that he is having a stroke. “I slept, I peed myself, I fell off the mattress, I fell out of chairs talking wildly. I scared them, whoever they were, the people I was supposed to know. I knew who James was, he was on the phone. He was in California. You can’t stay there. You have to go to the hospital. You can go to a different hospital. I changed my clothes. It was like dressing a mannequin.” This book is his declaration of return, his account of the struggle to regain language and the use of his body, and of the need to rebuild his memory all over again, beginning with his family history.

At the beginning, I was just making a list of things I was trying to remember. I had a stroke. It wiped me clean. I had to claw my way back into a self, into a body. I lost my right side to numbness, and I had no vocabulary. The poems accumulated as autobiography by default because I had no artifice but felt a great need to get it right. I needed to figure out what a doorknob was, what a sandwich was. Crush played with the ideas of self and other, of overlap and clash and rupture. War of the Foxes played with the self and its representation in painting and in myth. These new pieces don’t play. They’re focused on rebuilding a self in a very serious way.
My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing. [from an interview with Z.L. Nichols in BOMB Magazine Spring 2024 issue]

In three poems that come near the end of the book—”Line,” “Sentence,” and “Paragraph”—Siken tells the reader why he chose this format. I’ll quote from just two of them. From “Line”: “Orpheus descended. The red ribbon unspooled from his mouth in the darkness. He sang and it fluttered. [. . .] When does a line end? How long is a piece of string? A line ends when it is broken. [. . .] A sentence ends with a period but a line continues on. I wouldn’t break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was broken already.”

From “Paragraph”: “I didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in a box. [. . .] I set the margins and surrounded the thoughts on all sides. I made everything the same shape and concentrated on the space between the thoughts.” [My ellipses in both poems.]

Siken returns again and again to this theme that looks like miscommunication on the surface. It occurs primarily between himself and various medical professionals. In “The List,” the narrator complains about a nurse, his grief counselor, and his suicide counselor, all of whom have made up their minds about him based on other patients they have seen in the past. So he gives up on them and begins a second, apparently private notebook in which he is unafraid to write down what he is actually thinking. Here, he will not write in the terminology desired by the professionals. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall. —A doorknob is your stupid head. You will not survive this.” As he puts it, “I built up meaning with a double set of books.” The poem “Pain Scale” begins: “My primary care physician is not a neurologist. He doesn’t understand the difference between sadness and damage. I do not like this man. He refuses adjectives. He wants me to say My pain is eight, instead of Thunderous and upsetting. When he says You’ll be fine, I have to explain that I won’t because I have never been fine, but I’m not saying it right.”

At this point, reading “Pain Scale,” which happens to sit exactly halfway through I Do Know Some Things, there is a line that makes it apparent that this theme of miscommunication that Siken has been writing about is about something larger than his stroke. He tells us in one of the poem’s lines that “I think many people struggle with my aesthetic.” I’m sure many of us have sat in a doctor’s office and have been asked to rank some strange pain on a pain scale of 1 to 10, which makes no sense at all. So, we look to a poem like “Spoon” to understand a little more what Siken means by “my aesthetic.” In “Spoon,” the narrator is trying to figure out what makes him different from his two stepbrothers, who were “comfortable, powerful” and “didn’t worry about things.” He begins with some fairly obvious observations: “I was smarter but they had stamina. I was good with hypotheticals but they knew how to get things done, real things, with tools.” Then he moves on to more meaningful differences. Here’s the ending of the poem: “I had a certain capacity, which was a generous way of saying that I had nothing. Their hands were full but their skies were empty. No clouds, no shapes to guess. I was blurry at the edges and unrelatable. Do not try to bend the spoon. There is no spoon. It is only you that bends. I was the spoon and there is no spoon. I was blisteringly invisible.”

“Blisteringly invisible” conjures up the incandescent idea of a superhero of some sort. The young narrator of “Spoon,” looking up at his two older, confident stepbrothers, is realizing, in effect, that he is a poet. He is seeing that the characteristics that seem to put him at a disadvantage—like being “blurry at the edges and unrelatable”—can be attributes of exceptional value elsewhere. Throughout this book, Siken plays with these two extreme opposites, the damaged, hospitalized stroke patient and the man who knows himself far better than the attending professionals and the brawny stepbrothers.

To put this all together though, Siken has the reader pinballing back and forth across the pages of I Do Know Something, puzzling his life story out, much as he himself is trying to pull his own past back out of the black hole of the stroke.

Ω

“I wanted to reclaim the self I had. I was honest because I had no filter. I’m glad I couldn’t lie because I would have been tempted to lie. Why rebuild a self out of contaminated parts? I didn’t think of it as proving I was real or inventing anything. I just wanted to remember my friends, my preferences, what a light switch was. I wasn’t fractured, I was erased. The goal of these poems was very small: try to remember.” From “An Interview with Richard Siken” in Wildness 40

Siken brilliantly uses rhetorical devices like metaphor and metonymy to make his descriptions of concepts and ordinary events vivid. Take a poem called “The Waves,” where all that Siken is really talking about is his struggle to sleep and think clearly while in a hospital bed that has rails. He thinks that the word drift seems to describe his situation and realizes that it is “a sea word.” And immediately the poem takes off in a Homeric direction. “I strung the words and everything under the shattered clouds in sentences. By which I mean, the wine-dark sea. It bruises where the oars strike. . . I am the mermaids singing, twisted in the sheets. I am, I have, I know and say. I know, I have, I will and do. Whitecaps and froth. I yelled at the waves. The ghost of myself slept deep. Try to finish, finish the thought. Do not drop anchor here. . . The fingered dawn. The terrible shore. The complicated mooring.”

Siken slyly moves from the hospital scene into a vivid metaphor of Odysseus on his ship during his multi-year attempt to return home. We see him struggling to get past the Sirens (or mermaids, as he calls them) who are singing to lure him ashore where his ship would crash and he would die. In the following few brief sentences of the poem, the scene flickers between the hospital room and the rough Mediterranean Sea. But Siken leaves it up to us to make the connections, to figure out where we are and when narrator is Siken or Homer. We go adrift in the text in much the same way that the poet went adrift in his hospital room.

The poems in I Do Know Something describe extraordinary physical and mental struggles, but somehow, they manage to seem effortless. In “Piano Lesson,” Siken writes about one particular development in the modern piano. “By 1837, with some refinement of the pedals, a player could sustain the notes even after their hands had moved away.” The musician/poet can lift his or her hands into the air and say “Voila! It’s all magic!” There has always been something fearless in Siken’s poetry, especially in his previous book Crush (2005). But now, broken and repairing, his writing is audacious. He does know something, indeed.

Richard Siken. I Do Know Something. Copper Canyon Press, 2025.

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For decades I have been intrigued by novels and books of poetry in which the authors include photographs as an essential element of their “text.” How is each different author asking me, the reader, to respond to these visual interruptions or additions to their text? In 2025, I found a number of newly published examples of such books by writers from Australia, Austria, England, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, and the United States, one of which included a photographer from South Africa. Undoubtedly, many more titles were published that escaped my attention, and as I become aware of them I will add them here. I don’t have the ability to purchase or physically see every title listed here. I often rely on Google, Amazon’s “Read Sample” option, publisher’s websites, and Vertigo readers to show me or describe to me the images within these books.

If you see a book of photo-embedded fiction or poetry that you want to call to my attention from this or any other year, just let me know in a comment anywhere on Vertigo. My thanks to the many readers who have already pointed me to books that I had not known about. [Last updated with new titles January 7, 2026]

Check out the extensive, ever-expanding bibliography of hundreds of titles which can be found at the pull-down menu Photo-Embedded Literature at the top of Vertigo. There are also two downloadable files: Embedded: A Bibliography of Photo-Embedded Fiction & Poetry from the 1890s to 2023 lists in chronological order the over 700 titles I had located as of May 2024. That is accompanied by a separate, downloadable Author & Artist Index. Both can be found at the Downloadable Bibliography tab at the top of this blog. At some point in the next year or so, it will be replaced by an expanded second edition.

Photo-Embedded Fiction & Poetry 2025

Nadia Alexis. Beyond the Watershed. CavanKerry Press, 2025. A powerful volume of poems and photography that deal with her parents’ journey from Haiti to the U.S. and the struggle that both she and her mother face with men and violence. In the final poem: “Woman no longer endangered.” The volume contains eight full-page evocative photographs by the author, each showing a woman in a white dress who is blurred and in motion in a forest setting.

Joshua Beckman. Firefly. Holyoke, MA: The Brother In Elysium, 2025. Firefly consists of sixteen poems Beckman wrote during the summer of 2018, with four new photo collages by Jon Beacham responding to the text. These poems were written during Beckman’s first summer living in the woods in upstate New York, where he spent more time with non-human creatures than human ones. Firefly resumes a conversation between the poet and artist that began ten years earlier with the book Porch Light: lamp and chair (2012). Letterpress edition of 225 copies.

Max Besora. The Fake Muse. Rochester: Open Letter, 2025. According to the publisher, The Fake Muse is “infused with the spirit of pulp fiction, b-movies, zines, and punk rock.” The Amazon preview shows two photographs in less than a dozen sample opening pages. It’s not clear how many more images there might be. Translated from the 2020 Catalan original by Mara Faye Lethem.

David Bevan. Sightings. Manchester: Configo, 2025. Sightings is a collection of six stories by Bevan, with photographs by Maya Sharp in response to the stories. The book is the sixth in a series of collaborations between writers and artists. Set mostly in the South Pennines, these stories offer a glimpse into the lives of characters diverted by the birds they encounter.

Claude Cahun. Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals). Siglio, 2025. A new edition of Cahun’s 1930 masterpiece Aveux non Avenus (Paris: Édition due Carrefour). From the publisher’s website: “Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth.” The Tate/MIT volumes were simply titled Disavowals. Cahun’s text is accompanied by a number of photocollages created in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe).

Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff. Your Name Here. Dalkey Archive Press, 2025. DeWitt & Gridneff’s giant, baggy, novel-like thing about trying and failing to jointly write and publish this novel contains nineteen small photographs, nearly all relating to Italian movies of the Fellini era (i.e., film stills, promotional images, etc.)

James Elkins. A Short Introduction to Anneliese. Unnamed Press, 2025. An abbreviated and edited version of the description from the publisher: “Over dinner and then over the phone, unemployed biologist Anneliese Glur peppers Samuel Emmer with wild, seemingly endless monologues about numerous long books. She is no longer sure that she is sane, and she needs Samuel to read her book—a comprehensive theory of the essence of life, that transcends category or definition—to see if it makes sense. But Samuel is aging quickly. Her way of talking sounds to him like music and her startling ideas have evaporated, leaving only melodies.” The second in a series of five novels, following Weak in Comparison to Dreams (2023). It contains an unknown number of photographs.

Caleb Femi. The Wickedest. NY: MCD, 2025. Femi’s book of poetry is about “the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot,” according to the publisher. It contains color photographs of dance parties by the author.

Radka Franczak. godzina wieloryba. Cyranka, 2025. The title translates as “The whaling hour.” A reader says: “the author of this novel in Polish apparently wears many hats: film school graduate, screenwriter, photographer… This comes across in the choice and layout of the photographs in the book – from small snapshots embedded in the text to full-page collages, ranging from (somewhat Sebaldian) pictures of a desktop space strewn with opened volumes, notebooks, photographs, to historical images, maps, and engravings, to b&w photos of deep-sea creatures… (Franczak also designed the book’s cover.) Similarly, the writing deliberately slips between genres: storytelling, travelog, journal, fictionalized biographies, scientific research – into whales and the climate catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and how we all fit into it.”

Verónica Gerber Bicecci. La Compañía. NY: Columbia University Press, 2025. From Bicecci’s website: “This intervention of Amparo Dávila’s short story The Houseguest and the borrowed graphic elements of Manuel Felguérez’s The Aesthetic Machine, tell the story of a mining Company’s arrival in a small town, terrorizing its inhabitants.” From the Amazon website: “Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, La Compañía explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza [who writes the Epilogue] terms ‘an exemplary disappropriative work’.” La Compañía involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila’s short story The Houseguest, changing specific aspects of the text (i.e. verb tenses are transposed to the future) so that the house guest becomes a menacing presence and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of La Compañía along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. A second part includes scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of Long, Tall José, which construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. Both sections are accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci’s intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975). Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Christina MacSweeney.

Golden. Reprise: Poems and Photographs. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025. According to Amazon: “Golden’s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic.” His color photographs include many self-portraits (see the cover for a good example), images of family & friends, and old family snapshots. This is Golden’s second collection of poetry & photography after their A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (2022).

Susan Howe. Penitential Cries. NY: New Directions, 2025. The long, seemingly autobiographical title poem is about aging, healthcare, and death, and includes numerous uncited, tantalizing quotations as the poet thinks about the poets and poetry of the past. The other major poem is “Sterling Park in the Dark,” which consists of fifty pages of her “woven” poems, which are made from parts of phrases, words, and individual letters woven together architectonically, reminding us how suggestive written language can be even when we cannot glimpse the context or the connection of the words on view. The book contains one photograph of the sailboat “Exit,” taken from N.L. Stebbin’s book The Yachtsman’s Album (Boston, 1896).

Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: Prototype, 2025. A son and an aging father, who is about to move to a care center, spend a difficult weekend together attempting to grapple with memories, discoveries, fears, and regrets. The novel includes a dozen or so small b&w photographs, which are apparently by the author. I recently wrote a bit more about the book here.

Hervé Le Tellier. The Name on the Wall. Open Letter, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Struck by a name written on a facade of his new home, Le Tellier embarked on a quest to recover the history of André Chaix, a resistance fighter, a maquisard, killed at the age of 20 in August 1944.” A novel not unlike those of Patrick Modiano, The Name on the Wall combines historical fragments with fiction. It contains a number of photographs documenting Chaix’s life.

Joni Murphy. Barbara. Astra House: 2025. From the Amazon description: “Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness. As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.” The novel contains an unknown number of photographs.

Cait O’Kane. The Wasted Land. Tripwire Journal, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “This documentary poem by Cait O’Kane is modeled after T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Wasteland. It serves as a textual map of graffiti, narcotics, blight, & gentrification in the ‘changing neighborhood’ of Kensington, Philadelphia. Once a working-class enclave, this section of Philly has been portrayed internationally as the epicenter of the so-called ‘opioid epidemic’ enveloping the U$A. Punctuated by O’Kane’s photography, The Wasted Land moves through Kensington’s streets, avenues, & alleys, exploring intersections of capital, dispossession, development, & despair as the true epidemic plaguing its people.” It includes an unknown number of photographs.

Frances Presley. Black Fens Viral. Shearsman, 2025. Rectangular prose-poems that the author says are “the Black Fens [which] also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. Depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as an ecological disaster.” The book uses photographs, some taken by the poet, some borrowed from a 1970s book on the flatlands, and some printed as negatives.

Gerhard Rühm. The Folded Clock: 100 number poems. Prague: Twisted Spoon, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Blurring the distinction between “counting” and “recounting,” his “recitations” imaginatively translate arithmetic vocabulary into the mundane, the existential, or the cosmic, such as a history of the universe narrated as a solar year, from the Big Bang on January 1 to the moon landing in the last seconds of New Year’s Eve. Rühm’s images and texts unleash the sensual qualities of numerals to subvert our digit-filled environment with its pervasive intensification of seamless control.” The Folded Clock involves text, musical scores, and images (including at least one photograph), all, apparently, by the Austrian Rühm. Translated from the 2023 German original by Alexander Booth.

Dr. Ranganatha Sitaram. The Passing Spell: Life’s Kaleidoscope of Photo-Poems. Self-published, 2025. Dr. Sitaram is scientific director of brain imaging and more at St. Jude’s Research Hospital. The Passing Spell is “is an offering of photographs and poems from my life and travels in different parts of the world.”

Jeet Thayil. The Elsewhereans. Harper Collins India, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation – both the ones who leave and the ones left behind. A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention—an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.” One reviewer described it as “a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.”

Gabriele Tinti & Roger Ballen. Hungry Ghosts. Eris, 2025. A collaboration between the Italian poet Tinti and the South African photographer Ballen. According to Amazon: Hungry Ghosts draws “inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition,” and is an “evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.”

R.L. Edmondson Vance. The Goddess Fortune: To Proper Is To Die. Self-published, 2025. From Amazon: “I am visual artist who uses a variety of media to explore feminist themes and the self. My approach to both art and poetry is the same; collage. I find images or words I am innately attracted to, cut them out, arranging and rearranging until I find the perfect picture. I am heavily influenced by the found object; discarded magazines, the sky in a piece of junk mail, the still frame of a paused movie, the shape of a scrap of paper, any likeness or shape that calls to me. I consider the images of prehistoric goddess figurines, paramount and central to my own art, as a found object; Something someone was compelled to create that was lost or discarded, then found again. My poems are inspired by the found word; fortune cookies, passing billboards, my teenage diaries, made up and mis-heard songs, overheard conversations, grocery lists, and all other manner of words heard or seen in serendipitous encounters. I use collage to create a sacred space for these images and words, ancient and new. I feed myself found words and images; digesting, reconstructing, honoring form and phrase, creating a sacred place for each, and then gluing every one down in its rightful place.” Her collages frequently use bits and pieces of photographs.

Anne Waldman. Mesopotopia. Penguin, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century.” The book reportedly has about a dozen photographs scattered throughout.

Bryan Washington. Palaver. ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. Washington’s novel is about a Jamaican mother and her gay son who is working as an English tutor in Tokyo, as they attempt to find reconciliation. It opens with three full-page b&w photographs of Tokyo and has additional such photographs between each section. The photographs are by the author.

Myriam Watthe-Delmotte. Indemne: Où va Moby-Dick? Actes Sud, 2025. A reader says: “A book which imagines an original edition of the white whale changing hands and traveling across time. Narrated by Ishmael, strangely immortal, shipwreck survivor, the novel follows the fate of the book from the hands of its author to modern times. It’s not about engaging with Melville’s text per se, as wondering about the effect a book may have on a life. It includes some color images (reproductions of paintings) as well as photographs.”

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