Red Rover Red Rover

by Bob Hicok

Overview

Bob Hicok’s Red Rover Red Rover is joyous and macabre, hopeful and morbid, caring and critical. These poems are apocalyptic in tone but tender in their depiction of dying animals, disappearing water, raging fires, and the humans to blame. He calls attention to the dire costs of modern conveniences and begs for our willingness to change. No subject is too high or low for his wide-sweeping gaze, a comfort with extremes that gives his work the quality of an embrace. Threads of humor, romance, and kindness suggest America’s capacity to transcend the disastrous present: “heaven’s everywhere / someone needs a place to rest // and someone else says, / Come in.” Hicok presents a high-stakes game of survival and connection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596117
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	97
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Bob Hicok's ninth collection, Hold, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he’s also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes. His poems have been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Virginia Tech.

Read an Excerpt

Interlude

In the little swale where my wife sleeps to my right, I grow roses whenever she goes away for the weekend to see her family.
A place for everything and everything glowing on the inside if you close your eyes and look. How old will I be

when I die? Zero: a babe in the arms of the afterlife. How old will I be when I figure out how to stand unobtrusively among the junipers growing taller and more resilient in the night? She comes home,

sees the roses and knows
I’ve been up all night watering our life,
caretaker of the presence of her absence. Hello my deepest breath. Hello falling through space from our little while together standing still.


Weather Report

It’s snowing. December ninth twenty seventeen. No tracks in the snow on the deck, along the cedars, in my mind,
that combination jungle gym & jail cell.
I just watched a video of a starving polar bear.
It looked like brooms wearing a polar bear suit.
No Arctic ice. No ice means no seal hunting.
No seals means no living. It looked like a blanket that had taught itself to walk. Let’s talk about something else. Do you miss cocaine?
Sometimes I do when it snows. It’s the resemblance of shivering to doing a line. I never did much.
Not enough to get a polar bear high. Maybe a seal. What animal would you be if you could be any animal that isn’t endangered by climate change?
Is a roach an animal? A rock? Rocks are in the clear, and roaches exist in the popular imagination—the imagination everyone wants to date, the imagination that gets all the girls and boys and ocelots—as the creature that’ll be eating our Twinkies after apocalypse. Nothing kills roaches and Twinkies goes the thinking. No starving polar bears to feel sorry for then. Let’s talk about anything else. When you were a kid,
did you wear Superman pajamas, or sense it was ironic that you hid from the dark by closing your eyes,
or think we’d break the world?


Refraction

In Alaska the sun had insomnia:
I chased a rainbow at midnight south of nowhere in a rental car,
having lost my favorite cap.
As fast as I went, the rainbow went.
As awake as I was, the sky never blinked.
As much trouble as I have being around people, Alaska agrees:
Alaska gives humans the cold shoulder,
the frozen river, the scary bear.
I love that Alaska wants to be alone too.
For hours, the world was empty of McDonald’s, lawn mowers, For Sale signs,
capitalism; it was like looking in a mirror that ignored my face, that saw where I really came from, that stared back at the savanna inside my bones.
I pulled over and built a house of my affection: I would live there with distance and mountains and the intelligence of rainbows,
who are smart to be untouchable.
If we caught them, we’d put them in zoos,
cut them open, try to civilize them,
teach them French, teach them war.
I pulled over, sat on the hood and leaned into the air with my capless and bald head,
the bite of it, the hello of it,
and decided to stand taller within myself,
like a swing set or giraffe.
I’ve driven along fracked fields,
where mountains have been scalped and refineries channel apocalypse with their forests of pipes, their fire and smoke,
and while some places make me eager for lobotomy, Alaska made me want to be better, think better,
do better: to fit in. Not that I know what that is or means. Not that we can.
Just that we better. Just that we must.