Hicoks poems have a kind of severity, a moral accuracy, that both chills and refreshes the spirit, along with a technical virtuosity intrinsic to the work. He writes of the mundane with a brio that speaks to the meaning of metaphysical: beyond the physical, into the realms of light.Carolyn Kizer, Pollak Prize Citation The Legend of Light is a vivid, quirky, and deeply human book.Thomas Lux Bob Hicoks poems go out looking for whats least, but they also keep their eye, in these failing days of our century, on the large view, The term used / is megalopolis. This vast expanse is his terrain, and the subject he ably studies there isus, it turns out; or what he calls the hearts jazz. He listens to that music most industriously.Albert Goldbarth 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 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Hicok, Bob

Poetry

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

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 (Volume 1995) (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

University of Wisconsin Press

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 (Pitt Poetry Series)

University of Pittsburgh Press

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 (Pitt Poetry Series)

Bob Hicok is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech University. He is the author of This Clumsy Living, Insomnia Diary, Animal Soul (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, ) Plus Shipping, and The Legend of Light. Hicok is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in five volumes of Best American Poetry

Words for Empty and Words for Full (Pitt Poetry Series)

Animal Soul (Contemporary Classics Poetry series)

Chosen alongside celebrated poets Louise Glück and Czeslaw Milosz, Bob Hicok’s Animal Soul was the standout surprise of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. According to author David Wojahn, a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, this collection of poetry “is the best collection yet by a poet who has become one of the most individual and necessary voices of his generation. An almost prophetic rage seems to inhabit these poems, which present us with a speaker who is tender and brutally rueful by turns. Bob Hicok asks to be a voice of conscience in a conscience-less world. And, like all true prophets, his rage and consternation in the end transform themselves into a form of prayer, what one of his poems calls a ‘mad . . . devotion.’ Hicok is able to instruct and console us, and that is a very rare thing indeed.”

Invisible Cities Press LLC

Elegy Owed

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
[Elegy Owed is a] fluid, absorbing new collection... Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this world, we can, too. Highly recommended for a wide range of readers.” Library Journal, starred review
Bob Hicok is one of my favorite poets. Partly, it’s the movement of his lines, which are both conversational and utterly unexpected, almost as if he (or we) are joining a conversation that extends beyond the framework of the poemAnd then there’s his unrelenting vision, a sense of the world as both utterly real and utterly elusive, and heartbreaking because we have to die. Death is at the center of Hicok’s writingnot in a maudlin, self-pitying way, but rather as a vivid presence, infusing everything, even the deepest moments of connection, with a steely sense of loss.”David Ulin, reviewing Elegy Owed in the Los Angeles Times
This gorgeous collection [Elegy Owed] spans the landscape of loss with unexpected leaps and ripples, as if someone has skipped stones across a lake. Wordplay, subtle humor and unexpected moments of hope give these lush poems depth and dimension. Hicok’s work is memorable because of the new vistas it creates.” The Washington Post
"Words have weight in Hicok’s poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, Hicok evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, Hicok builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension, he cleaves to earth, skin, breath." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Hicok’s poems [in Elegy Owed] are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter.” Publishers Weekly
"Seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."The New York Times Book Review
When 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.” His poems are the messenger at the door, the unwanted telegramtelling a joke, imparting a depth of longing, returning us finally to a different kind of normality where the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call.” There is grief in these poems, though it is a grief large enough for odd awakenings and the unexpected, a grief enlarged by music, color, and joy as well as sober wisdom.
Hicok is funny as hell, in Blake’s sense of the infernal: irreverent, anarchic, undeceived. His bracing ill humor is a vehicle for outrage, longing, tenderness, and a shy cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premier anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet.” Mark Doty
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.

United States

Copper Canyon Press

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 review
When 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 pocket and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow- robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain with contrail above like an accent in a language too large for my mouth. A mirror so whoever opens the past will see themselves in the past and fall back from their face speaking to them across centuries or hours or 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.

"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 Review
"Hicok'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 Weekly
In Sex &amp; Love &amp;, 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 done to or with or for me—while wearing the loose breeze of a dress or standing inside its red zero on the floor— while bending over and pulling her shorts down on a racquetball court or to reach the water shutoff valve behind the fridge—as Satie whispers against our thighs or humming her brain's native tune as we touch the smudged glass protecting extinct beetles in a museum—with her lips swaddling my tongue or finger up my ass—is tell the truth— which makes my wife the hottest woman I've ever known—her mouth erotic every time she speaks—she is an animal when it comes to sex and love—comes to us—in that she doesn't primp in front of the mirror of what she thinks I want her to say or be—the only real flesh—only naked that matters––how she looks at me 
Bob 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.

Sex & Love &

"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 Weekly
Bob 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 breath shuttling in and out, as if it can’ t decide between stay and go, the little bird long gone by the time I realize the sun has set and it will soon feel like my father was never here, which is no big deal compared to the erasures the world endures and offers every day, except this one is mine
Bob Hicok teaches at Virginia Tech University and is the author of ten collections, including Animal Soul, This Clumsy Living , Elegy Owed, and Sex &amp; Love &amp;. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, respectively.

Hold

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hicok, Bob. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hicok, Bob

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hicok, Bob. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Legend of Light (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

The Legend of Light (Volume 1995) (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

Insomnia Diary (Pitt Poetry Series)

This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry Series)

Words for Empty and Words for Full (Pitt Poetry Series)

Animal Soul (Contemporary Classics Poetry series)

Elegy Owed

Elegy Owed

Sex & Love &

Hold