Red Rover Red Rover - Softcover

Hicok, Bob

 
9781556596117: Red Rover Red Rover
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1556596111 ISBN 13: 9781556596117
Verlag: Copper Canyon Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Bob Hicok’s Red Rover Red Rover is joyous and macabre, hopeful and morbid, caring and critical. These poems are apocalyptic in tone but tender in their depiction of dying animals, disappearing water, raging fires, and the humans to blame. He calls attention to the dire costs of modern conveniences and begs for our willingness to change. No subject is too high or low for his wide-sweeping gaze, a comfort with extremes that gives his work the quality of an embrace. Threads of humor, romance, and kindness suggest America’s capacity to transcend the disastrous present: “heaven’s everywhere / someone needs a place to rest // and someone else says, / Come in.” Hicok presents a high-stakes game of survival and connection.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bob Hicok's ninth collection, Hold, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he’s also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes. His poems have been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Virginia Tech.

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Interlude

In the little swale where my wife sleeps
to my right, I grow roses
whenever she goes away
for the weekend to see her family.
A place for everything
and everything glowing
on the inside if you close your eyes
and look. How old will I be

when I die? Zero: a babe in the arms
of the afterlife. How old will I be
when I figure out how to stand
unobtrusively among the junipers
growing taller and more resilient
in the night? She comes home,

sees the roses and knows
I’ve been up all night
watering our life,
caretaker of the presence
of her absence. Hello
my deepest breath. Hello
falling through space
from our little while together
standing still.


Weather Report

It’s snowing. December ninth
twenty seventeen. No tracks in the snow
on the deck, along the cedars, in my mind,
that combination jungle gym & jail cell.
I just watched a video of a starving polar bear.
It looked like brooms wearing a polar bear suit.
No Arctic ice. No ice means no seal hunting.
No seals means no living. It looked like a blanket
that had taught itself to walk. Let’s talk
about something else. Do you miss cocaine?
Sometimes I do when it snows. It’s the resemblance
of shivering to doing a line. I never did much.
Not enough to get a polar bear high. Maybe
a seal. What animal would you be if you could be
any animal that isn’t endangered by climate change?
Is a roach an animal? A rock? Rocks
are in the clear, and roaches exist
in the popular imagination―the imagination
everyone wants to date, the imagination
that gets all the girls and boys
and ocelots―as the creature
that’ll be eating our Twinkies
after apocalypse. Nothing
kills roaches and Twinkies
goes the thinking. No starving polar bears
to feel sorry for then. Let’s talk
about anything else. When you were a kid,
did you wear Superman pajamas, or sense
it was ironic that you hid from the dark
by closing your eyes,
or think we’d break the world?


Refraction

In Alaska the sun had insomnia:
I chased a rainbow at midnight
south of nowhere in a rental car,
having lost my favorite cap.
As fast as I went, the rainbow went.
As awake as I was, the sky never blinked.
As much trouble as I have
being around people, Alaska agrees:
Alaska gives humans the cold shoulder,
the frozen river, the scary bear.
I love that Alaska wants to be alone too.
For hours, the world was empty
of McDonald’s, lawn mowers, For Sale signs,
capitalism; it was like looking in a mirror
that ignored my face, that saw
where I really came from, that stared back
at the savanna inside my bones.
I pulled over and built a house
of my affection: I would live there
with distance and mountains
and the intelligence of rainbows,
who are smart to be untouchable.
If we caught them, we’d put them in zoos,
cut them open, try to civilize them,
teach them French, teach them war.
I pulled over, sat on the hood
and leaned into the air
with my capless and bald head,
the bite of it, the hello of it,
and decided to stand taller within myself,
like a swing set or giraffe.
I’ve driven along fracked fields,
where mountains have been scalped
and refineries channel apocalypse
with their forests of pipes, their fire
and smoke,
and while some places make me eager
for lobotomy, Alaska
made me want to be better, think better,
do better: to fit in. Not that I know
what that is or means. Not that we can.
Just that we better. Just that we must.

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Verlag
Copper Canyon Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1556596111
ISBN 13 
9781556596117
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
97
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Verantwortliche Person
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