Elegy Owed - Softcover

Hicok, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556594380 ISBN 13: 9781556594380

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

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: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1556594380
• ISBN 13: 9781556594380
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128