Bob Hicok

Despite an America flooded with dangerous hypocrises, Bob Hicok celebrates the unapologetically sentimental wonder of living at all.

Hold

"Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, [Hicok's] writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page."-- 'Los Angeles Times' "Seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."-- 'The New York Times Book Review' Gritty, complicated, and earnest, 'Elegy Owed' breaks--then salvages--the rules for mourning. While poet Bob Hicok remembers the departed as ephemera or skin cells, fog is invited to tea and the beauty of dandelion fluff is held for ransom. Hicok's language is so humid with expectation and fearlessness that his poems create a clandestine manual to survival. From "The Order of Things": 'Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thoughtI was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listenedto deafness. Then I tacked a whisperto the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelionsbest in their afro stage. Then a breezeheld their soft beauty for ransom. Then no onethrows a Molotov cocktail betterthan a Buddhist monk...' Bob Hicok is one of the most active poets writing today, and his poems have appeared widely, including in 'The New Yorker' and 'Poetry'. His honors include the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and a "Notable Book of the Year" from 'Booklist'. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Elegy Owed

Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize. “Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok's poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our 'clumsy living' with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which 'the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'”--Beckian Fritz Goldberg

This Clumsy Living

In Sex & Love &, Bob Hicok attempts the impossible task of confronting love and its consequences, in which “everything is allowed, minus forever.” Switching gracefully between witty confessions and blunt confrontations, Hicok muses on age, distance, secret messages, and, of course, sex. Throughout, poetry is discovered to be among our most effective tools to navigate the delirium of making contact.

Sex & Love &

This clumsy living

Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away is an experimental conversation with the highest and lowest facets of humanity. “Once a man who sometimes wanted to kill himself loved a woman who sometimes wanted to live.” In Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away, we witness a brilliant poet enter a dark space and attempt to write himself out again. Told in experimental forms, from a range of perspectives— a wife who commits suicide, a husband left behind — this raw collection reads like a novella and wrestles with loss as it complicates the grief process. Working backwards from acceptance to explore depression and anger, heartbreak and remorse, often with great tenderness, Water Look Away offers pages of insight that will make you reach for a pen. Here, poetry embalms a marriage–an experimental affair, a series of miscarriages, a red bed painted on a wall. When the retelling of their first meeting morphs from “recounting” to “dreampage,” Hicok asks, how long can we trust memory when those we love are no longer there to remember with us? These are not passive poems—period placement, unconventional spellings, and neologisms invite an active reader who is prepared to question meaning and intention. A present collection written in the past tense, these lines make you want to hold your loved ones closer, and prove that while this collection is no fairytale, it is still a love story—of husband and wife, of poetry and language. Within every poem is an undeniable love for words and a vulnerable appeal to individuals who share this affinity for language: “I’m always reading. Turning the pages of your face. / Dog-earing the way you smiled.”

Water Look Away

Hicok's gift lies somewhere between those of the surgeon and the gods of the the foundry and convalescent home: seamlessly, miraculously, his judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning. --The New York Times.

Poems

Plus Shipping

Bob Hicok’s Red Rover Red Rover is joyous and macabre, hopeful and morbid, caring and critical. These poems are apocalyptic in tone but tender in their depiction of dying animals, disappearing water, raging fires, and the humans to blame. He calls attention to the dire costs of modern conveniences and begs for our willingness to change. No subject is too high or low for his wide-sweeping gaze, a comfort with extremes that gives his work the quality of an embrace. Threads of humor, romance, and kindness suggest America’s capacity to transcend the disastrous present: “heaven’s everywhere / someone needs a place to rest // and someone else says, / Come in.” Hicok presents a high-stakes game of survival and connection.

Red Rover Red Rover

Whether Hicok is considering the reflection of human faces in the Vietnam War Memorial or the elements of a "Modern Prototype" factory, he prompts an icy realization that we may have never seen the world as it truly is. But his resilient voice and consistent perspective is neither blaming nor didactic, and ultimately enlightening. From the shadowed corners into which we dare not look clearly, Hicok makes us witness and hero of The Legend of Light.

The Legend of Light

“As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can’t help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.” —Corduroy Books “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.” —Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living “The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there's almost no problem that can't be solved by this poet's gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review on Insomnia Diary

Words for Empty and Words for Full

The punchlines of poems evolve into seriousness, and thoughtful meditation is transformed into comedy in this fourth collection of poems that demonstrates the writer's fluid talent to shift mood and use language for effect. Original.

Insomnia Diary

“The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok’s compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there’s almost no problem that can’t be solved by this poet’s gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review

Bob Hicok

About

Books

Join the club