Breathe

Hicok's newest collection interrogates love, purpose, belief, and desire with stunning candor and an ever-burning desire for understanding.

Hicok's poetry has long been distinctive for its compassionate breadth of feeling, curiosity, and play. In Breathe, he meets the social and cultural moment, soothing distress with tenderness while meditating on the persistence of love. Hicok writes with candid intimacy and affection to his wife, to his cat, to his dying father, and always to the extraordinary within the quotidian. Playful and absurdist, these poems yet reveal an undeniable longing "to believe in something." Honest in his witness of death and violence, Hicok celebrates the potential for change within each of us. 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."

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.