Bob Hicok

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.

Bob Hicok is a spectrum... I'd love to see an MRI of his brain while he's writing, as the neurons show us what's possible, how a human can be a thought leader, taking us into the future... Hicok interrogates the world with mercy and wit and style and intelligence and modest swag. He's one of America's favorites--and to make the reader want to share the poet's reality fulfills poetry's finest aspiration. --Washington Independent Review of Books In his ninth collection, Hicok navigates a world bereft of empathy and kindness, leading by example with a charm and emotional intelligence that speaks to a deep insight into the human condition... Mixing cleverness with tenderness, Hicok demonstrates how to be a beacon of light in the darkest of settings. --Publishers WeeklyBob Hicok's tenth collection of poetry, Hold, moves nimbly between childlike revelry and serious introspection. While confronting the rampant hypocrisies of the American collective unconscious, Hicok is guided by his deep and tender sense of whimsy and humility. Pointing to the natural world as a mirror through which to rediscover human beauty, he pauses to unapologetically celebrate the wonder of living at all. From About the size of it: . . . my breathshuttling in and out, as if it can't decide between stay and go, the little birdlong gone by the time I realizethe sun has set and it will soon feellike my father was never here, which is no big dealcompared to the erasures the world enduresand offers every day, except this one is mineBob Hicok teaches at Virginia Tech University and is the author of ten collections, including Animal Soul, This Clumsy Living, Elegy Owed, and Sex & Love &. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, respectively.

The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself.--The New York Times Book ReviewHicok's poems are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter, often in sincere and heartbreaking ways.--Publishers WeeklyIn 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 examine the delirium of making contact. Hot: The sexiest thing a woman has ever doneto or with or for me--while wearing the loose breezeof a dress or standing inside its red zero on the floor--while bending over and pulling her shorts downon a racquetball court or to reach the watershutoff valve behind the fridge--as Satiewhispers against our thighs or hummingher brain's native tune as we touchthe smudged glass protecting extinct beetlesin a museum--with her lips swaddling my tongueor finger up my ass--is tell the truth--which makes my wife the hottest womanI've ever known--her mouth erotic every timeshe speaks--she is an animal when it comes to sexand love--comes to us--in that she doesn't primpin front of the mirror of what she thinks I wanther to say or be--the only real flesh--only nakedthat matters--how she looks at meBob Hicok's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a Notable Book of the Year by Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently teaching at Purdue University.

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. What Hicok's getting at in Elegy Owed] is both the necessity and the inadequacy of language, the very bluntness of which (talk about a paradox) makes it all the more essential that we engage with it as a precision instrument, a force of clarity, of (at times) awful grace.--Los Angeles Times A] fluid, absorbing new collection. . . . Highly recommended.--Library Journal, starred reviewWhen asked in an interview What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot? he answered Bob Hicok. Elegy Owed--Hicok's eighth book--is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and you can never step into the same not going home again twice. From Notes for a time capsule: The twig in. I'll put the twig in I carry in my pocketand my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cupof the Ganges and the bacteria from shitin the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow-robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountainwith contrail above like an accent in a languagetoo large for my mouth. A mirrorso whoever opens the past will see themselvesin the past and fall back from their facespeaking to them across centuries or hoursor the nearnevers . . . Bob Hicok's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

"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

Solstice: voyeur. I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close the door of summer behind them, their heads floating on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds, I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day of shy midnight, they kissed like waterfalls, like stones that have traveled a million years to touch, and emerged hybrid, some of her lips in his words, all of his fists opened by trust like morning glories, and I smelled green pouring out of trees into grass, grass into below, I stood on the moment the earth changes its mind about the sun, when hiding begins, and raised my hand from the hill into the shadows behind the lovers, and contemplated their going with my skin, and listened to the grass in wind call us home like our mothers before dark.

Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They’re just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a moment of epiphany zags into comedy. Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of Insomnia Diary. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.

Buddha alarm clocks, Shiva spice racks, dying gardeners, gunned-down prostitutes, suicidal visionaries, and a god "who is shorter/and a better cook than your God" populate these poems that arrive Plus Shipping. Demanding our perception of the world in payment, Hicok shows us that time has "bones we can count/and a soul made temporal by math."

These poems, reflecting a kind of severity, set out to produce a morally accurate view of the mundane world they inhabit. The poet also, however, keeps his eye on the larger view - on megalopolis, and also what he himself calls, ""the heart's jazz"".