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 Booklist Notable Book of the Year.

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Paterson Award for Literary Excellence.

"What Hicok's getting at in "Elegy Owed"] is both the necessity and the inadequacy of language, the very bluntness of which (talk about a paradox) makes it all the more essential that we engage with it as a precision instrument, a force of clarity, of (at times) awful grace."--"Los Angeles Times"

" A] fluid, absorbing new collection. . . . Highly recommended."--"Library Journal," starred review

When asked in an interview "What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?" he answered "Bob Hicok." "Elegy Owed"--Hicok's eighth book--is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and "you can never step into the same not going home again twice."

From "Notes for a time capsule":

"The twig in. I'll put the twig in I carry in my pocket
and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup
of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit
in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow-
robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain
with contrail above like an accent in a language
too large for my mouth. A mirror
so whoever opens the past will see themselves
in the past and fall back from their face
speaking to them across centuries or hours
or the nearnevers . . . "

Bob Hicok's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

"As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can't help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work."-Corduroy Books

Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation. Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions. Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association Provide s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago. Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum"

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 the grass in wind call us home like our mothers before dark.