Hold

Bob Hicok is a deeply humane hoot. His poems are smart, thoughtful, playful, serious, and fun. He twists language and jiggles cliche. His poems zigzag through irreverent riffs that lead to touching and startling conclusions. His themes are language, love, politics, and inhumanity. He sides with the vulnerable and writes with such panache you know he gets as much delight in finding where the poems are taking him as the reader does. He’s written a lot of books, and all of them are a rollick of sweetness, sharpness, honesty combined with a sense of culture and personal weirdness. Midway into Hold, I searched for other books of Hicok’s I haven’t read and ordered three.

Half my copy is dog-eared, and if you visit me, I will read to you all evening. These poems are narrated by a superior intellect, one that makes connections and splits infinitives and marries cousins and organizes coups like he was icing cakes. Adept isn't the word. You want to scrap your training and re-learn the craft at the School of Acrobatics like Hicok must have. Now it's drop-the-baby funny, and now it's abandon-the-homeland sad. All my life I will not know how he does it.

Fresh idiosyncratic poetry which resonates