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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.”
About the author
Bob Hicok was born in Grand Ledge, Michigan, in 1960. For more than twenty years, he owned an automotive die designing company and also worked as a computer systems analyst. Hicok, a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Guggenheim, began writing poems when he was 20. In 2004, following the publication of his first four books, he received an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Along with
Breathe, Hicok is the author of twelve previous collections, including
Animal Soul,
This Clumsy Living,
Elegy Owed, shortlisted for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently,
Water Look Away. In 2013,
This Clumsy Living was translated into German by Judith Zander and released by Luxbooks. His writing has appeared in journals and magazines including
The New Yorker,
Poetry Magazine, and
The American Poetry Review, and has been anthologized in nine volumes of
The Best American Poetry. Currently, Hicok teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Tech University.
