Whether Hicok is considering the reflection of human faces in the Vietnam War Memorial or the elements of a Modern Prototype factory, he prompts an icy realization that we may have never seen the world as it truly is. But his resilient voice and consistent perspective is neither blaming nor didactic, and ultimately enlightening. From the shadowed corners into which we dare not look clearly, Hicok makes us witness and hero of The Legend of Light.
"

Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of Insomnia Diary. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize.
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"

Poetry. Mr. Hicok's gift lies somewhere between those of the surgeon and the god of the foundry and convalescent home: seamlessly, miraculously, his judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning (The New York Times). Imagine spring's thaw, your brother said, / each house a small rain, the eaves muttering / like river and you the white skin / the world sheds, your flesh unfolded // and absorbed. You walked Newark together... (Heroin). Bob Hicok is an automotive die designer living in Ann Arbor Michigan. His The Legend Of Lights won the 1995 Felix Pollak Poetry Prize and ALA...