Sex & Love &

"The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself."The New York Times Book Review

"Hicok's poems are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter, often in sincere and heartbreaking ways."Publishers Weekly

In Sex & Love &, Bob Hicok attempts the impossible task of confronting love and its consequences, in which "everything is allowed, minus forever." Switching gracefully between witty confessions and blunt confrontations, Hicok muses on age, distance, secret messages, and of course, sex. Throughout, poetry is discovered to be among our most effective tools to examine the delirium of making contact.

From "À la carte":

She took her underwear off in the restaurant
where you eat in the darkfingered herself
in the dark while noticing the complexity
of saffron in the darkslipped her finger
in my mouth in the darkwhen we got outside
we took her underwear to the Seine
and set it free¬and went our separate ways

Bob Hicok's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and theAmerican Poetry Review. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a "Notable Book of the Year" byBooklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.