Plus Shipping

by Bob Hicok

Buddha alarm clocks, Shiva spice racks, dying gardeners, gunned-down prostitutes, suicidal visionaries, and a god "who is shorter/and a better cook than your God" populate these poems that arrive  Plus Shipping . Demanding our perception of the world in payment, Hicok shows us that time has "bones we can count/and a soul made temporal by math."

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Bob Hicok was born in 1960. His most recent collection, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. His other books are Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001),a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping (BOA, 1998), and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin, 1995), which received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry.

Hicok writes poems that value speech and storytelling, that revel in the material offered by pop culture, and that deny categories such as "academic" or "narrative." As Elizabeth Gaffney wrote for the New York Times Book Review: "Each of Mr. Hicok's poems is marked by the exalted moderation of his voice—erudition without pretension, wisdom without pontification, honesty devoid of confessional melodrama. . . . His judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."

Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Reviews

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love his way with words!

[Jonathan Tennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to read for school. Had never heard of Hicok. I guess that’s why I am in school. Learned a lot. Some great stuff in this collection. Hicok’s story before he became a published poet and teacher are interesting as well because it shows normal people write poetry and that poetry is for everyone. My favorites are: Heroin, Plus Shipping, Waiting for UPS, Fieldwork, & Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem.

[George Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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For friends who want to read this book, I leave the importance of reading a book here. I wish good luck to the sellers and customers...

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[Michael Heimbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bob Hicok is easily my favorite living poet—hell, the man’s very NAME is a poem, with its double short O’s and incredibly satisfying pops of consonance. He seems to approach his craft the way an oyster makes a pearl, lovingly polishing and refining (but never laboring) until each phrase, each stanza glows with an almost impossible sheen. I’ve now read 6 of Hicok’s books and this one (at the risk of recency bias) just might be my favorite. Every page practically vibrates with imagination—in his hands, the ordinary corners of life become sacramental and the world’s greatest terrors take on a strange sort of beauty. Anyone who purports to care even a little about poetry, art and life owes it to themselves to seek out his work, readings and interviews (start with his appearances on the Rattle podcast and get ready to have your life changed).

Oh, and did I mention he’s hilarious?

ONE THING AND ANOTHER

The crows are tagged to see how far they'll take
the night of their bodies. Five big as miniature
dachshunds own the oak and the air they've filled
with backfire. I ask my friend who farms if crows
kill or just scavenge. This reminds him he saw
a hawk hunt a blue jay above the red pine
three men can hug without touching fingers.
The hawk landed on a branch with the jay limp
as rope in its mouth. Crows he doesn't think
hunt or pick on other birds as jays do.
He hates jays as the bullied must and tells me
four boys sealed him in the closet of a half-
built house with cinder blocks when he was 8
and he was there most of the night. Two of them
still live down the road and recently asked
if he'd help with the threshing and at the end
of the day one of them mentioned what happened
and smiled as if remembering his first erection.
The crows fly off and come back like there's a wind
inside they're trying to let out. I ask why he helped
and he says his father had a cow that hated
the cold and got sick more often than the others.
Once it slipped on some ice and five bulls
circled, kicked and butted until it was bleeding
everywhere and his father shot it in the head
with a .38, the sound from his bed like a roll
of caps pounded with a rock. He asks
if I think crows are ugly and I say I used
to wander the abandoned Vernor's plant, adoring
the ghost machines as a priest might robes
and chalices and blood wine. Everything the crows
say is rust and we listen to them hate
our presence until they fly off with the red
wounds of their tags. I ask if his mother
still shoots them out of her swamp-white oak.
He says she sleepwalks and last month
he found her beside the grave of her husband,
night coat open, black birds beginning
their soothsaying, her hair too wild not to stroke
before waking her to a face she made long ago
out of something irreparable as love.

[Lex · Rating 4 out of 5]

"and pretend her life is mine, that I've ceased wanting more than I'm prepared to understand and have nurtured revenge into elegant survival."

My favorite poem of all time is the last poem in this chapbook, "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem." I'm not sure where I read it the first time, but shortly after I got as many of Hicok's chapbooks from my university library as I could and have read a good deal of his work. I enjoy what he writes a whole lot and the last two stanzas of Other Lives have made a deep and everlasting impact on me.

[T. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's one of my favourite poems from this collection:

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem
Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
                 of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
                                  at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
                 staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
                                  is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
                 of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
                                  I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
                 a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
                                  kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
                 anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
                                  to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
                 My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
                                  something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
                 or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
                                  she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
                 somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
                                  in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
                 and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
                                  in each place and forever.

Cover art is the center panel of Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity. Rivera is the husband of Frida Kahlo.

[Katelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of his firsts; it's interesting going at his work backwards. He's a little more daring here, a little more presumptuous. But his sketches of people are lovingly crafted, and a few turns of phrases are phenomenal.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff, here--Bob Hicok, my new favorite poet.

[Rebekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and challenging. One of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a long time...