Elegy Owed - Hardcover

Hicok, Bob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556594364 ISBN 13: 9781556594366

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2013

Synopsis

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 poem And 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 writing not 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 telegram telling 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Bob Hicok: Bob Hicok's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. His books include This Clumsy Living (Univ. Pittsburgh, 2007), which was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, and The Legend of Light (Univ. Wisconsin, 1995), which was named a "Notable Book of the Year" by 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.

From Booklist:

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 (one particularly teasing poem is titled “Knockturn”), he cleaves to earth, skin, breath. He describes odd, private rituals involving attempts to reassemble shards and stop time. His variations on the elegy can be haunting, romantic, and bracingly irreverent. “Elegy to hunger” begins, “There’s a strain of cannibalism / I admire.” Intimate lyrics of love, fear, loss, and cosmic perplexity are matched by robust dissections and protests. Hicok’s mordant view of our doomed consumer culture in “Obituary for the middle class” is balanced by his gruffly tender objection to the word inanimate, “Steel’s got a pulse / as far as I’m concerned.” This trenchant collection’s got heart and soul. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1556594364
• ISBN 13: 9781556594366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 120