Words for Empty and Words for Full

by Bob Hicok

Overview

"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."—Corduroy Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990932
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/28/2010
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	312 KB

About the Author

Bob Hicok is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech University. He is the author of This Clumsy Living, Insomnia Diary, Animal Soul (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Plus Shipping, and The Legend of Light. Hicok is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in five volumes of Best American Poetry.

Table of Contents

Contents In these times After the procedure Some things that come together in coming apart See side Life Scenic Thanatos BRCA1 Endangered species A wedding night Kinesis Punk, or a mouthful of sweat glands Methodical Redoubling our efforts This, that needs to be done Keeping track Man to man A trinity of goods Watchful So I know Whimper Mute Troubled times Terra incognita This day as a version of the last In the loop Shorn Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window To find the new world Meditation on a false spring Between us RU486 a history of origami Minutes of the minutes In the future, the future will be the past Call me a lyre, I dare you Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down Making the list I will never make Getting in line Backward Breathing amber Learning to swim Tree of life From the history of grade school Stop-loss you are here Foreign dispatch For the time capsule Basic physics All law enforcement is local First do no harm An account of lately A shopkeeper’s story One interpretation of your silence Go __________ Connect Epithalamium Do you too always feel differently the same? People who live in stones should cast glass houses A primer Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

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.”
—Corduroy Books

“With ‘Words for Empty and Words for Full,’ Hicok has begun to find a way to combine the several aspects of his imagination—narration, association, humor, self-conscious reflexivity. The result is poetry memorable for its structure, its image and sound, but also for demanding that we readers enter into some serious thinking about our place and time.”
—Boston Review

“Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet—if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative. Ever alert to the transient beauties and beautiful ironies of the world, Hicok’s poems praise even as they grieve. Love, physical and emotional, is a consistent theme: the joy of it, the need for it, the pain of lacking it, and above all, its ability to redeem.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“One of the hallmarks of Hicok’s poems is their momentum, the exhilarating force with which his voice carries them forward. But the poems here are driven by an especial sense of urgency, by Hicok’s need to engage with the problems that swirl around us.”
—West Branch

From the Publisher