This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Bob Hicok (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pitt Poetry Series | Publication Date: February 1, 2007

"Bob Hicok’s poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page." --Los Angeles Times "Hicok’s new collection will further broaden the reputation of a poet already celebrated at mid-career; his 'Animal Soul' was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in 2002. Hicok is known for his muscular, witty, and charming language, and if poetry is a surrealist mechanism made of words, then this is a perfect poet. But is poetry such a mechanism? Though Hicok never misses a chance to make fun and to have fun, his poems offer a great deal more than ready playfulness. What elevates Hicok above many talented--but limited-pyrotechnists is his brave openness toward his (and our) feelings. He does not merely show off his tricks in front of the world; he embraces it. As he says in a poem about cancer, 'There is a piece of a second/ during which a jet is not flying/ nor is it on the ground.// I’m working on a theory/ that no one can die/ inside that piece of a second.// If you are comforted by this thought you are welcome/ to keep it.' Ultimately, this collection works because it dwells on human experience and because at its best the language is charged with unforgettably lyrical wisdom. Recommended for all poetry collections." --Library Journal "Disarmingly quotable. . . . Offers an unruly and winning combination of brio and bizarrie, halfway between Billy Collins and Dean Young." --Publishers Weekly (online), January 1, 2007 "Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok's poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our 'clumsy living' with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which 'the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'" --Beckian Fritz Goldberg "To enjoy Hicok's poems, leap in and prepare for a wild ride. Go anywhere he takes you. Just don’t expect to head down the straight avenue of reassuring narrative structure." --ForeWord Magazine "At his best, [Hicok] has always fused deeply wounded moments of pathos with an oddly welcome levity, much like everybody’s favorite uncle who’s never afraid to tell a good joke at a funeral, even if it’s his wife lying in the casket. And the same can be said of 'This Clumsy Living', perhaps Hicok's most obscure and mature book to date. Most notably, and with a heightened political consciousness in tow, these poems meditate on the tyranny of the human condition in the early twenty-first century." --Barn Owl Review "A generously conceived and executed book that seems broader and riskier than his earlier work. His future books are worth anticipating."—Karen Kevorkian, Virginia Quarterly "Hicok provides occasions for individuals to laught at themselves and their own living--clumsy, yes, and well intended." --American Poet, Vol. 33 "The arrival [of] 'This Clumsy Living' . . . is cause for celebration, as it firmly places him among a collection of astute poets with a keen eye for both the common and the extraordinary, and confirms these poems, at turns playful and disturbing though always emotionally charged, as some of the finest being written today." --American Book Review

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hicok's neo-surrealist charm and conversational wit have gathered, slowly and certainly, a following for his four previous books: this fifth shows the casual (sometimes too casual) divagations and distortions of everyday life in which he has specialized, both in rapidfire prose poems and in a fluently American free verse. At his best, he is disarmingly quotable: "It is comforting to talk/ to large animals, whether they listen or not". Hicok (Insomnia Diary, 2004) oscillates between incidents from his own life and responses to breaking news, concluding "there's so much tearing down to build to tear down to forget/ there was anything to remember." A long dialogue about an apparently imaginary painting becomes a defense of Hicok's associative method, suggesting that you too might live without "a frame around your life." At best, Hicok offers an unruly and winning combination of brio and bizarrie, halfway between Billy Collins and Dean Young; at worst, his poems sound chatty and improvised, able to continue indefinitely.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

" The arrival of This Clumsy Living is cause for celebration, as it firmly places [Hicok] among a collection of astute poets with a keen eye for both the common and the extraordinary, and confirms these poems, at turns playful and disturbing though always emotionally charged, as some of the finest being written today."
--American Book Review

“Bob Hicok’s poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.”
--Los Angeles Times

Hicok’s new collection will further broaden the reputation of a poet already celebrated at mid-career; his Animal Soul was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in 2002. Hicok is known for his muscular, witty, and charming language, and if poetry is a surrealist mechanism made of words, then this is a perfect poet. But is poetry such a mechanism? Though Hicok never misses a chance to make fun and to have fun, his poems offer a great deal more than ready playfulness. What elevates Hicok above many talented—but limited—pyrotechnists is his brave openness toward his (and our) feelings. He does not merely show off his tricks in front of the world; he embraces it. As he says in a poem about cancer, “There is a piece of a second/ during which a jet is not flying/ nor is it on the ground.// I’m working on a theory/ that no one can die/ inside that piece of a second.// If you are comforted by this thought you are welcome/ to keep it.” Ultimately, this collection works because it dwells on human experience and because at its best the language is charged with unforgettably lyrical wisdom. Recommended for all poetry collections.
—Library Journal

”Disarmingly quotable. . . . Offers an unruly and winning combination of brio and bizarrie, halfway between Billy Collins and Dean Young.”
--Publishers Weekly

”At his best, [Hicok] has always fused deeply wounded moments of pathos with an oddly welcome levity, much like everybody’s favorite uncle who’s never afraid to tell a good joke at a funeral, even if it’s his wife lying in the casket. And the same can be said of ‘This Clumsy Living’, perhaps Hicok’s most obscure and mature book to date. Most notably, and with a heightened political consciousness in tow, these poems meditate on the tyranny of the human condition in the early twenty-first century.”
—Barn Owl Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822959534
• ISBN-13: 978-0822959533
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #626,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Killer Poems, January 20, 2007

By 

Austin Hummell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

The Publishers Weekly review crowding the box above is really smart and wrong. Hicok's are the best poems living in magazines this month and last year, and This Clumsy Living is really pretty evidence of it. To sandwich him between Collins and Young--two poets who really can hurt you with laughter--is to mistake style for substance. Bob Hiock has said forty more important things than either of them.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Good Reason to be Alive, May 31, 2008

By 

Billy Pink (Not in Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

It is good to know that the words you have spent money on earn their keep, to know that when you want to read something that descibes your feelings or something you'd never bring to mind, Bob Hicok has done it for you -- like he always has. There is no better poet and everybody knows it. He can take a big idea and unravel it until the room is full of debris and there's a little shiny thing sitting in the corner -- or a small idea and wind it up into a Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo. Nothing's ever dull in Bob Hicok's imaginative world. This book has about forty poems but it feels like four hundred poems. The way Hicok writes is so original it's like a lawn made of poems you have to keep watering with the hoses of your eyes and then mow it back with the lawnmower of your mind. He writes about the bad times, the just about-almost-but-not-quite-right times, his wife, something in there about a dog, cows, trees, mother, father, working class people, the real times or just as often: I made this whole thing up but now that you think of it, it couldn't have been more real -- about birds, death, people you've never heard of, rivers, deer, Bob Hicok, wolves, wind, his wife. And even though Hicok is well known as being quite a humorous writer, just as often there's beauty and wistfulness in his poetry. Like this:


Solstice: voyeur

I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close
the door of summer behind them, their heads floating
on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings
changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds,
I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day
of shy midnight, they kissed like waterfalls, like stones
that have traveled a million years to touch, and emerged
hybrid, some of her lips in his words, all of his fists
opened by trust like morning glories, and I smelled green
pouring out of trees into grass, grass into below, I stood
on the moment the earth changes its mind about the sun,
when hiding begins, and raised my hand from the hill
into the shadows behind the lovers, and contemplated
their going with my skin, and listened to grass
in wind call us home like our mothers before dark.



This guy can write. And anything done well looks easy. The man is brilliant. Nobody derails language like Hicok, only to put it through this prism he carries with him, to show you how he sees things on his side, which seems obvious once you go his way around. In the process, to follow his thinking, sometimes you have to fine-tune your own thinking, but that's not so hard -- that's why we read. This book of poetry is more than worth a thousand prices. I say we are lucky, because to be breathing on this planet at the same time as Bob Hicok, to be kindly flattened by his magnitude, justifies, in my mind, at least one good reason to be alive right now.

PS --- It will not be noteworthy to most of the world, nor can he make any more of it than the world is willing to acknowledge, but one day, in my useless opinion, Bob Hicok will be named
Poet Laureate of the United States.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Our Best Contemporary Poets, November 7, 2007

By 

J. A Carty "Jessie Carty" (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Length:: 0:34 Mins

Bob Hicok has a gift for taking what seems to be the average everday events--even the mundane and gritty/dirty and turns them into poetry. But he isn't just a working man's poet. He is also a very skilled craftsman of poetry who is very intellectual and aware of his world. You simply have to get this book to see his skill as in such poems as "A poem with a poem in its belly." The poem read aloud and/or scene on the page will just amaze.

And what else doesn't hurt with reading Bob Hicok? Gosh, he is often pretty darn funny! One of my favorite lines is from "My career as a director" which says: while a fire / suggests that the cylce of life is beautiful / though not energy efficient.