Water Look Away
A Novella
Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away is an experimental conversation with the highest and lowest facets of humanity.
“Once a man who sometimes wanted to kill himself
loved a woman who sometimes wanted to live.”
In Bob Hicok’s Water Look Awaywe witness a brilliant poet enter a dark space and attempt to write himself out again. Told in experimental forms, from a range of perspectives— a wife who commits suicide, a husband left behind — this raw collection reads like a novella and wrestles with loss as it complicates the grief process. Working backwards from acceptance to explore depression and anger, heartbreak and remorse, often with great tenderness, Water Look Away offers pages of insight that will make you reach for a pen. Here, poetry embalms a marriage–an experimental affair, a series of miscarriages, a red bed painted on a wall. When the retelling of their first meeting morphs from “recounting” to “dreampage,” Hicok asks, how long can we trust memory when those we love are no longer there to remember with us?
These are not passive poems—period placement, unconventional spellings, and neologisms invite an active reader who is prepared to question meaning and intention. A present collection written in the past tense, these lines make you want to hold your loved ones closer, and prove that while this collection is no fairytale, it is still a love story—of husband and wife, of poetry and language. Within every poem is an undeniable love for words and a vulnerable appeal to individuals who share this affinity for language: “I’m always reading. Turning the pages of your face. / Dog-earing the way you smiled.”
Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Grand Ledge, Michigan. His first book of poems, The Legend of Light, was published in 1995 by the University of Wisconsin Press, and he earned his master of fine arts degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2004. His work has earned him a number of accolades, including two NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, eight Pushcart Prizes, and the Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize. He has published eleven previous books of poetry, most recently Elegy Owed, Sex & Love &, Hold, and Red Rover Red Rover all from Copper Canyon Press. His writing has appeared in journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The American Poetry Review, and has been anthologized in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is currently an English professor at Virginia Tech University.
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