Insomnia Diary (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Hicok, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822958422 ISBN 13: 9780822958420

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

Synopsis

Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They’re just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a moment of epiphany zags into comedy. Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of Insomnia Diary. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.

About this title

About the Author

Bob Hicok is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech University. He is the author of This Clumsy Living, Insomnia Diary, Animal Soul (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Plus Shipping, and The Legend of Light. Hicok is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in five volumes of Best American Poetry.

From the Back Cover

"Hicok is funny as hell, in Blake's sense of the infernal: irreverent, anarchic, undeceived. His bracing ill humor is a vehicle for outrage, longing, tenderness, and a sly cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premiere anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet."-Mark Doty

"[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."-Rodney Jones

"The sophisticated jester of these soliloquies, dumbfounded by the simplicity and complexity of life, is on a hang glider headed straight for Olympus."-Mary Ruefle

Reviews

"It's late and I've stayed up to miss you," Hicok writes, in his customary plain speech. "A man on TV's playing lute with dirty fingernails." In his fourth collection, Hicok writes with a newfound maturity and an appealing lack of obsession with self, examining the joys and pains (mostly pains) of ordinary others. As in earlier books, he chronicles a blue-collar life, a life in which "no matter what happens you have to punch in." The collection commences with a poem about a mentally ill roommate ("At least once you should live with someone/ more medicated than yourself"), and is also populated by a father, an uncle, a wife, a guy holding up a gas station and a little girl obsessed by the size of her hips. Two of the most moving poems concern a laid-off worker, told from the perspective of the boss: "When I told him/ I saw he was looking for a place/ in his brain to hide." Whimsical, even surreal, self-deprecation is one of the recurring gestures of the book; Hicok details the familiar encroachments of age on his hairline and rear end and accuses himself of being a voyeur as the urge for actually doing things ebbs. Although desire is not absent from these poems, the love that Hicok writes about is nearer agape than eros, present despite its frequently class-based trappings: "[W]ho's to say/ love isn't a power suit, Power/ book, coffee/ for breakfast." People drink a lot in these poems; they smoke dope, they smoke cigarettes, they try to escape themselves—and Hicok does not indict them, or himself, for it. "I'm a better poet than man," Hicok writes, but one suspects it really isn't true.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822958422
• ISBN 13: 9780822958420
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96