Breathe

Praise for Bob Hicok

“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

“Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet―if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative.“—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed deserves to win the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry… 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.“—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

“Yet ultimately the most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok’s compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there’s almost no problem that can’t be solved by this poet’s gentle humor.“—David Kirby, New York Times

“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

“At his best, he is disarmingly quotable.“—Publishers Weekly

“Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet—if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative.“—Los Angeles Review of Books

“The best book of poems you are likely to read until Bob Hicok publishes another book.“—Passages North

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.