These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies.In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness, and a flair for vocal cross-dressing, the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction - an ingénue masquerades as a femme fatale, a doctor appears more disturbed than his patient, and parents seem more unruly than their children. Eccentric, intimate, arch, anxious, decadent and sometimes mournful, the book's confiding, conversational voices tell stories recognisable and refracted, carried along by the undercurrent on which the collection ebbs and rides: the anguish and energy brought about by a long-distance love affair, which propels and terrorises and ultimately unites the work.Dear Boy is an irresistible and enlivening collection by a new poet of startling and various gifts.

    Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this world, we can, too. Highly recommended for a wide range of readers.”— Library Journal, starred review“Bob Hicok is one of my favorite poets. Partly, it’s the movement of his lines, which are both conversational and utterly unexpected, almost as if he (or we) are joining a conversation that extends beyond the framework of the poem…And then there’s his unrelenting vision, a sense of the world as both utterly real and utterly elusive, and heartbreaking because we have to die. Death is at the center of Hicok’s writing—not in a maudlin, self-pitying way, but rather as a vivid presence, infusing everything, even the deepest moments of connection, with a steely sense of loss.”—David Ulin, reviewing Elegy Owed in the Los Angeles Times“This gorgeous collection [Elegy Owed] spans the landscape of loss with unexpected leaps and ripples, as if someone has skipped stones across a lake. …Wordplay, subtle humor and unexpected moments of hope give these lush poems depth and dimension. Hicok’s work is memorable because of the new vistas it creates.” —The Washington Post"Words have weight in Hicok’s poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, Hicok evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, Hicok builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension, he cleaves to earth, skin, breath." –Donna Seaman, Booklist“Hicok’s poems [in Elegy Owed] are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter.” —Publishers Weekly"Seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."—The New York Times Book ReviewWhen asked in an interview “What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?” he answered, “Bob Hicok.” Elegy Owed, Hicok’s eighth book, is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and “you can never step into the same not going home again twice.” His poems are the messenger at the door, the unwanted telegram—telling a joke, imparting a depth of longing, returning us finally to a different kind of normality where “the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call.” There is grief in these poems, though it is a grief large enough for odd awakenings and the unexpected, a grief enlarged by music, color, and joy as well as sober wisdom.“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 shy cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premier anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet.” —Mark DotyBob Hicok is one of the most active poets writing today, and his poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker and Poetry. His honors include the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and a "Notable Book of the Year" from Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

    The alphabetically arranged collection provides a generous sampling of each poet with a photo, biographical sketches, and bibliographies.

    "Poignant, sexy. . . lyrical, passionate. . . cool and delicate. . . hot as a chili pepper."--Boston Globe.

    AN ARAB TERRORIST ATTACK. DEMOCRACY UNDER SIEGE. Mario Puzo envisioned it all in his eerily prescient 1991 novel, The Fourth K.President Francis Xavier Kennedy is elected to office, in large part, thanks to the legacy of his forebears– good looks, privilege, wealth–and is the very embodiment of youthful optimism. Too soon, however, he is beaten down by the political process and, disabused of his ideals, he becomes a leader totally unlike what he has been before. When his daughter becomes a pawn in a brutal terrorist plot, Kennedy, who has obsessively kept alive the memory of his uncles’ assassinations, activates all his power to retaliate in a series of violent measures. As the explosive events unfold, the world and those closest to him look on with both awe and horror.

    Previously published in Anvil New Poets 2, a selection chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, and winner of the 1994 Eric Gregory Award, Oswald already clearly demonstrates a distinct voice. The poems here are extraordinarily beautiful: intensely musical, strewn with emotion, and full of energy and warmth. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. The second part of the book features an entertaining long poem titled The Men of Gotham, a comical folk-legend about the three men who went to sea to try to catch the moon in a net. Taken together, this is a wonderful first collection by an exceptionally talented young poet.

    These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth / and muzzle / coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why / they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find — in the forest or in our own hearts — ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there.Full of risk and wonder, Black Cat Bone shows the range of Burnside's abilities, but also strikes out for new territories. He remains consistently, though, one of our finest living lyric poets and each of these astonishing poems is as clear and memorable as 'a silver bracelet // falling for days / through an inch and a half / of ice'.