{"title":"Bob Hicok","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"water-look-away","title":"Water Look Away","description":"\u003cb\u003eBob Hicok's \u003ci\u003eWater Look Away \u003c\/i\u003eis an experimental conversation with the highest and lowest facets of humanity.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Once a man who sometimes wanted to kill himself \u003cbr\u003eloved a woman who sometimes wanted to live.\"In Bob Hicok's \u003ci\u003eWater Look Away\u003c\/i\u003e, we witness a brilliant poet enter a dark space and attempt to write himself out again. Told in experimental forms, from a range of perspectives-- a wife who commits suicide, a husband left behind -- this raw collection reads like a novella and wrestles with loss as it complicates the grief process. Working backwards from acceptance to explore depression and anger, heartbreak and remorse, often with great tenderness, \u003ci\u003eWater Look Away\u003c\/i\u003e offers pages of insight that will make you reach for a pen. Here, poetry embalms a marriage-an experimental affair, a series of miscarriages, a red bed painted on a wall. When the retelling of their first meeting morphs from \"recounting\" to \"dreampage,\" Hicok asks, how long can we trust memory when those we love are no longer there to remember with us?These are not passive poems--period placement, unconventional spellings, and neologisms invite an active reader who is prepared to question meaning and intention. A present collection written in the past tense, these lines make you want to hold your loved ones closer, and prove that while this collection is no fairytale, it is still a love story--of husband and wife, of poetry and language. Within every poem is an undeniable love for words and a vulnerable appeal to individuals who share this affinity for language: \"I'm always reading. Turning the pages of your face. \/ Dog-earing the way you smiled.\"","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793302585386,"sku":"9781556596506","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/water-look-away-9888386.jpg?v=1762151313"},{"product_id":"sex-love","title":"Sex \u0026 Love \u0026","description":"Hicok's leaps of verbal play, incisive frankness, and wild imagination engage the often-fraught discussions of monogamous love and sexuality","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793302847530,"sku":"9781556594755","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/sex-love-9491124.jpg?v=1762151312"},{"product_id":"this-clumsy-living","title":"This Clumsy Living","description":"Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok's poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our 'clumsy living' with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which 'the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live \/ more like a minute than a clock.'\"--Beckian Fritz Goldberg","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793302913066,"sku":"9780822959533","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/this-clumsy-living-7710299.jpg?v=1762151312"},{"product_id":"legend-of-light","title":"Legend of Light","description":"Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal s \u003ci\u003eSeaway to the Future\u003c\/i\u003e unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation. Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, \u003ci\u003eSeaway to the Future\u003c\/i\u003e shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions. \u003cbr\u003eBest Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association\u003cbr\u003e Provide s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago. Chris Rasmussen, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\"","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793303109674,"sku":"9780299149147","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/legend-of-light-6282633.jpg?v=1762151312"},{"product_id":"words-for-empty-and-words-for-full","title":"Words for Empty and Words for Full","description":"\"As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can't help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.\"\u003ci\u003e--Corduroy Books\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793303175210,"sku":"9780822960775","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/words-for-empty-and-words-for-full-1961222.jpg?v=1762151312"},{"product_id":"plus-shipping","title":"Plus Shipping","description":"Buddha alarm clocks, Shiva spice racks, dying gardeners, gunned-down prostitutes, suicidal visionaries, and a god \"who is shorter\/and a better cook than your God\" populate these poems that arrive \u003cem\u003ePlus Shipping\u003c\/em\u003e. Demanding our perception of the world in payment, Hicok shows us that time has \"bones we can count\/and a soul made temporal by math.\"","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793303240746,"sku":"9781880238677","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/plus-shipping-2583668.jpg?v=1762151255"},{"product_id":"insomnia-diary","title":"Insomnia Diary","description":"Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They're just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a moment of epiphany zags into comedy. Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of \u003ci\u003eInsomnia Diary\u003c\/i\u003e. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43793303502890,"sku":"9780822958420","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/insomnia-diary-6064184.jpg?v=1762151255"},{"product_id":"breathe-poems-bob-hicok","title":"Breathe","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHicok's newest collection interrogates love, purpose, belief, and desire with stunning candor and an ever-burning desire for understanding.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eHicok's poetry has long been distinctive for its compassionate breadth of feeling, curiosity, and play. In \u003ci\u003eBreathe, \u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eBreathe\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bob Hicok","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44359919927338,"sku":"9781556597305","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/breathe-poems-by-bob-hicok-1149466.jpg?v=1778816487"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/bob-hicok.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}