Bob Hicok – författare

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 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.

"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 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 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 & Love &. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, respectively.

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.”