POET

Bob Hicok (1960 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Bob Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Animal Soul (2001); and This Clumsy Living (2007). Hicok has won Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He once worked in the automotive die industry and owned his own business, Progressive Technology; he has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University and Virginia Tech.

Elizabeth Gaffney, in the New York Times Book Review, described his skills as being “somewhere . . . between those of the surgeon and the gods of the foundry and convalescent home: seamlessly, miraculously, his judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning.” His poems offer varied portraits of the lives and stories of working people, violence, unexpected beauty, and trenchant observations on human nature.

When asked by interviewer Laura McCullough about the relationship between restraint and revelation in his work, Hicok replied, “Because I don’t know where a poem is headed when I start, it seems that revelation has to play a central part in the poems, that what I’m most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind. . . . Maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences.”