Hold

by 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 "In his ninth collection, Hicok navigates a world bereft of empathy and kindness, leading by example with a charm and emotional intelligence that speaks to a deep insight into the human condition… Mixing cleverness with tenderness, Hicok demonstrates how to be a beacon of light in the darkest of settings." ― Publishers Weekly Bob Hicok’s tenth collection of poetry, Hold , moves nimbly between childlike revelry and serious introspection. While confronting the rampant hypocrisies of the American collective unconscious, Hicok is guided by his deep and tender sense of whimsy and humility. Pointing to the natural world as a mirror through which to rediscover human beauty, he pauses to unapologetically celebrate the wonder of living at all. From "About the size of it": . . . my breath
shuttling in and out, as if it can’ t decide
between stay and go, the little bird
long gone by the time I realize
the sun has set and it will soon feel
like my father was never here, which is no big deal
compared to the erasures the world endures
and offers every day, except this one is mine Bob Hicok teaches at Virginia Tech University and is the author of ten collections, including Animal Soul, This Clumsy Living , Elegy Owed , and Sex & Love & . He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, respectively.

Genres: Poetry

107 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2018

About the author

Bob Hicok was born in 1960. His most recent collection, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. His other books are Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001),a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping (BOA, 1998), and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin, 1995), which received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry.

Hicok writes poems that value speech and storytelling, that revel in the material offered by pop culture, and that deny categories such as "academic" or "narrative." As Elizabeth Gaffney wrote for the New York Times Book Review: "Each of Mr. Hicok's poems is marked by the exalted moderation of his voice—erudition without pretension, wisdom without pontification, honesty devoid of confessional melodrama. . . . His judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."

Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Reviews

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the poems in Bob Hicok’s fine collection HOLD can be like watching a skater go out as close as possible to the point above the water where the ice thins and is likely to break. This can be harrowing, but you end up wanting to applaud. His “Waiting is the hardest part of waiting” has this startlingly frank conclusion:

…………….. if you get my meaning,

let me know, because I’m lost.

Readers and critics who insist that poetry must steer clear of politics and social issues will not be happy with Hicok, but he clearly doesn’t give a damn. Here’s his “Poem ending with a murder/suicide”:

It’s interesting to me there’s a minimum
but no maximum wage. One without the other
seems like pants without legs or love
without someone to love. So what
are the groups — people
who want no minimum or maximum wage;
people who want a minimum
but no maximum wage; people
who want a minimum
and maximum wage; and people
who want to eat. A minimum wage
of twenty bucks an houris roughly eight hundred a week,
or forty grand a year,
or 1.6 million in a life. There’s
your maximum wage — 1.6 millions a year.
If you earn in a year
what I earn in my entire life,
you deserve the right
to be happy about it
in a gated community
where you don’t have to be ashamed
of the dance of your joy.
I deserve the right
to put heirloom tomatoes
in the salad now and then.
Such as when my kid
got her cast off
and her hand looked fine,
like it intended to go on waving
at moonlight and birds.
And I never thought about it
but slipped the insurance card
out of my wallet and slid it over.
And the car started
the first time
for the drive home
to our little bungalow
that needs a new paint job
but that’ll happen this summer,
right before we go to a lake
for a few says and I open a beer
one night and think, I have a place
in whatever this is.
Then listen to the stars
saying nothing in peace
or what passes for peace
is a mystery to me,
not unlike who’s behind
the universe or why so many people
in unions voted for people
who wanted to kill unions, but we did
and they died, unions died.
Now where on Earth
am I supposed to send the flowers?

That’s followed by “The South is where I live now,” which deals with America’s ongoing, irresolvable Civil War .

Hicok can also be exquisitely personal. Here’s his “Encore,” with its goosepimple-inducing conclusion:

ENCORE

At the rehab center
late night when my father
presses the call button,
someone hurries in
and shuts it off, thus maintaining
their quick-response rate, but leaves
without helping him pee, he tells me
in a whisper on the best
spring day of the year so far,
of the century: I could have picked
two hundred
million snowdrops on the way in
had I the patience
and a doll’s fingers. He’s afraid

of angering the staff and has learned to pee
on himself with dignity. It’s all

in the not-crying. In imagining

he’s a chunk of wind
the next day while his penis
is being washed
and he can’t feel it, just a sock
with a hole in it. I’m afraid

of the future. That I’ll need a gun

to help me out of the jam
of having a body. Is what I’m thinking

while holding his hand, while believing
there’s nothing to be done

about the weight of the night
on his chest, except to lift him
and carry him home and give him back
to his own bed to live and die in,
as he and my mother
gave me to the sun all those years a go
to run under and end up here,
not knowing what to do
about the rumor that part of us
goes on after the heart’s last sigh,
other than applaud the possibility
as I would a woman
standing up from a piano
after the gazelles of her ha ads
have stopped running, the music over
but not the chance for more music
if we clap enough that she believes
how desperate we are and that only
she can save us.

That one should start showing up in the anthologies beginning now.

Hicok in a prose poem about an artist/lover at work: “Her face scrunched while she worked. She looked like a rose struggling to bloom. I get that way kneading bread.”

Without fail, Hicok can return to us from the far edge of the skatable ice and be content with the simple and abundant quotidian. He can be wonderfully funny, and — I always have to point this out about a poet if it’s true — he doesn’t seem to have the slightest interest in creating work for academic literaturists to puzzle over and theorize about. There’s a welcome clarity and amiability in this book all the way through.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was an autobiographical dream you didn't have,
headstone inscriptions provide clues,
the exact coordinates ping off silhouette cell towers,
directing the poet to where his ego is billboard visible.

#poem #verse #sonnet #poetry

Chris Roberts, God Unvanquished (Mostly)

[Cody]

bob remains the goat. favorite pieces were “the big book of therapy,” “zing,” and “if it’s not fixable, don’t break it”

[S꩜phie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rare to have a collection where almost every poem is a banger

[James Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hicok is best as a kind of spiritual and emotional miniaturist, plumbing the microcosm of the human heart and the intimacy of relationships. He is also a wonderful poet of midwesterness. And he pulls off something that is so rare it is fantastical: the celebration of *marital* eroticism. But when, in this collection, he veers into the political--as any poet must today--the wheels fall off. The result is the poetic equivalent of MSNBC. The allusivity is gone.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the political poems were really powerful and resonant, some were disappointingly glib and superficial. And my dude, congrats on "genuinely adoring the scent of [your] wife's vagina," but I'm not sure that merits mention here.

[Sally Boots · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hicok takes you for a wild ride with his poems and always deposits you somewhere insightful at the end. About 3/4 of the poems in this collection blew my mind. The other 1/4 took stream-of-conscious wacky in the nonsense direction—or maybe I just didn't get them. (One of the women in my book group said, "I think he's just getting stoned and then writing poetry." Pretty apt. But I'm still trying to work out whether I think that's a bad thing.) I particularly like the poems that touch on the current political climate. Hicok frames the pain of this moment in history in ways that feel like poetry, not like a rant, which is hard to do.

[Saran Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved his work in "Elegy Owed" but this one just felt a little flat to me. There are a lot of poems that feel sort of... impersonal, I guess. For instance, some poems regarding a friend's gay wedding, tutoring a refugee, and an acquaintance with breast cancer all feel like mining someone else's life for content, which would be fine, except that Hicok then tries to make all those subjects personal, and that's where it starts to feel a little disingenuous. If nothing else, there are still some really good moments where Hicok's trademark barrage of imagery shines.

[Lauren Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always been a huge Hicok fan, but this collection did not hit as hard as his work usually does. The first half of poems were great, but something happened in the second half of the book that totally turned me off. The political poems weren't poetry, just word vomit. Hicok and I even agree on most issues, but the poems were so lazy why even write them? Here's an example of what I can't believe even made it to print:

"I don't think it's my biz whether my jizz ultimately becomes a tot or not"

Just no.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very, very glad I read this collection of poems. I read a previous collection by the poet, but I know they didn’t hit me nearly as hard or as directly as these did. He writes as a white man of his experience of race and racism - and does not try to inhabit another skin, but completely his own. He writes of many things - his marriage, his life, his world. It is a stunning collection. I loved it. It made me think and feel again and again and again.

[Nat Baldino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was talking to a friend about his feeling that poets get worse over time, that when they approach old age they run out of things to say, or become too wistful. I don’t know if I agree, but I do know that I fully believe Bob Hicok will never feel old to me. Every new book of his I read makes me believe in the power of poetry, humor, tinged goofiness.

[Aarik Danielsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first things you notice about Hicok's work is how funny, self-referential and pop-culture savvy it is. But he's also profound in a sly way, with just one turn of phrase turning the whole poem on its head. I'll definitely be seeking out more of his work.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful and playful collection covering social justice, white privilege, and broader topics. At times funny at times poignant. Dichotomy Lobotomy is a prize.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book just cements my love for Bob Hicok! So good.

[Eric Lander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible poetry.

[sarah ౨ৎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite poems: “The big book of therapy,” “Flight plan,” “Amen,” “Encore,” “Civilization,” and “Getting there.”

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear eyed and tall standing.

Refreshing to read of being a son (among many other beings here).

[Ace Boggess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful to read. This grows on me more each time I read it like the deep cuts on a great album.