Customer Reviews

Plus Shipping (American Poets Continuum)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A great writer. He uses such simple language to convey unique and thought-provoking ideas. He's a very raw poet, which works well for him. My only dislike is his need to blatantly repeat or reveal what message he wishes to give, as if he needed to sum things up in the end.

Bob Hicok is a poet's poet, but that doesn't make his work any less accessible to poetry lovers and cross-genre readers. While meticulously crafted, Hicok's poems offer a colorful range of wide-open insights and images that stay and stay. "Heroin," one of this collection's most stunning poems (also anthologized in a recent Best American Poetry volume), is in itself worth the price of this book, plus tax, shipping, and delivery. PLUS SHIPPING lives up to the promise of Hicok's earlier book, and then some.

Dear People Who Read Poetry ---

Has anybody read this book besides me and the other two people who have commented here and the parsers who may or may not get paid a few bucks to pass judgment on the written word in various publications? I hate to come back from the dead to proffer yet another opinion about Bob Hicok's work, but in lieu of committing suicide again, in order to do so, I have extended my deadline, so to speak. This is more of an observation than anything else. I'd bet that Bob has all but forgotten this book of poetry. Like the sand paintings of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians, these words have been lost, blown away in the wind. This book is out of print, a stray dog no one wants to usher into the house because they just know the first thing it's going to do is shake-off the rain all over the furniture, so it's best, at least for the reluctant host, to send it back into the gloaming with a hearty fare thee well and a stifled compulsion in their heart and mind to do right. I say, Let the dog in, damn the rain, read Hicok's words even as they hang down from the walls in a loop. All poets, writers and readers, take heed: Hicok puts thoughts together which only come to us as in the dreams of sleep, when the true genius of our minds is free to walk naked through the neural network, uncensored --- these acutely meaningful word patterns are inexplicably unattainable by the pen that we, you and I, hold in our hand, unless of course,
we are the poet who is Bob Hicok.