Plus Shipping by Bob Hicok

Plus Shipping Reviews

• 
  Jonathan Tennis

  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.
• 
  Lex

  "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.

  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

  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

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

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