ATHENS, Ga. – Bob Hicok, award-winning author of four collections of poetry and a two-time contributor to the annual Best American Poetry series, will read from his work at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 7, in Park Hall room 265 on the University of Georgia campus. The reading is sponsored by The Georgia Review and the Georgia Poetry Circuit, a consortium of state colleges and universities that brings poets of national renown to the state each year. The reading is free and open to the public.
Hicok’s books are The Legend of Light (1995), Plus Shipping (1998), Animal Soul (2001) and his latest, Insomnia Diary (2004). He has received two Pushcart Prizes, the 1995 Felix Pollack Poetry Prize, an NEA Fellowship and a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. He has published in dozens of magazines including The New Yorker, Ploughshares and Poetry. Poets and Writers magazine recently described him as “the nation’s most prolific nonacademic serious poet since William Carlos Williams.”
Bob Hicok recently took a teaching position at Virginia Tech, but for seventeen years he worked as an automotive-die designer figuring ways to shape sheet metal into car parts. His poetry has a vitality and independence that rely on this nonacademic background.
According to the New York Times, “Mr. Hicok’s gift lies somewhere between those of the surgeon and the god of the foundry and convalescent home: seamlessly, miraculously, his judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning.” Poet Rodney Jones said that “[Hicok] writes with an honest man’s happy discontent . . . His poems stand on that inconvenient ground where the absurd and romantic visions battle for the voice and transmit the full joyful and afflicted human creature. He is one of the finest poets to have emerged in the last ten years.”
Copies of Hicok’s books will be available at the reading for purchase courtesy of Byhalia Books. Poems by and interviews with Hicok are available on a number of Web sites, including www.caffeinedestiny.com/hicok.html.
