Hicok’s newest collection interrogates love, purpose, belief, and desire with stunning candor and an ever-burning desire for understanding.

Bob Hicok soothes distress with tenderness in his newest collection, Breathe, meditating on the persistence of love in the modern era. Through poems that drip with affection, Hicok writes to his wife and his cat, to his dying father and to the “the moon alone / or the ocean full of languages.” There is a longing “to believe in something”—perhaps in pickle ball or in the cello’s ability to make a beautiful person. Here, Hicok treats “elation as a career” in a post-COVID world, reflecting on a cultural shift with a penchant towards violence but great potential for change. In a world that is constantly in quickening motion, Breathe is a call for stillness—a call “To understand what leaves / are saying to the wind. To be deserving / of the giddyup of your breath.”