Red Rover Red Rover

Bob Hicok

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.

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ISBN: 9781556596117

Format: Paperback

Stops and starts

Drove the night. As I knocked,
she was at my door, knocking.
Drove the day back to her note
and thought of her holding mine.
The phone rang. Did you see it, she asked.
I said yes, sure she meant the dead dog
we both passed, but she meant the spirit
of the dog trying to cross the road.
As soon as she said she stopped
and tried to touch it,
I saw a field of sunflowers
and wondered why I’ve never pulled over
and walked loose among them,
all those heavy heads nodding
toward my own. Weird that yellow’s
the color of cowardice
when the sun never runs.
We fell asleep on the phone.
As blinds dates go,
it was a good omen that we were happy
together alone.

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, and his poems have been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Virginia Tech.

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Reviews

“Even in a bad year, Hicok seems to have the medication to treat it, approaching all of the challenges that face us with the gentle humor for which he has long been known…There’s hope here, and sadness here, and fear here, and anger here, and charm here, in just the right proportion of potion to let the reader know that this work is right here, with all of us, that the author is right here, with all of us, that we can almost believe him, and that we can still be thankful for this medication, for our many reasons to live, and for our many ways to do so.”—New York Journal of Books