Breathe

Bob Hicock

Forthcoming April 2026

Cover Design: Phil Kovacevich. Cover Art: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Self-portrait: Two Birches, Fosters Pond, 2005.

Hicok’s poetry has long been distinctive for its compassionate breadth of feeling, curiosity, and play. In Breathe, he meets the social and cultural moment, soothing distress with tenderness while meditating on the persistence of love. Hicok writes with candid intimacy and affection to his wife, to his cat, to his dying father, and always to the extraordinary within the quotidian. Playful and absurdist, these poems yet reveal an undeniable longing “to believe in something.” Honest in his witness of death and violence, Hicok celebrates the potential for change within each of us. Breathe is a call for stillness—a call “to understand what leaves / are saying to the wind. To be deserving / of the giddyup of your breath.”

Paperback: $17.00 list price

Bookshop Amazon
Receive this book as a gift when you donate.

ISBN: 9781556597305

Format: Paperback

Breathe

I breathe, you breathe, we all breathe
for ice cream. To breathe masked as thieves.
To walk and sit with the depth of a grave
between us. We stayed inside. We tried to hide.
Millions died. Billions wondered, Will I join them?
To breathe, of all things to grieve, make brave,
to fear as shiv. I thought I should not breathe
in public air. I knew I could not breathe
without a care. We went out, into open air.
Our masked faces reduced to eyes. We were saved
by the graves between us. Millions died.
Billions wondered, Is distance the shape of life
from now on? To breathe, respire, aspire. I aspire
to have you here. To see and kiss your face.
To move in space among hips and worries, hurries
and shouts, on a subway, bus, in a museum,
to be roughed and tumbled, to reach, breach,
to broach a hand on a shoulder, to grow older
amid, among. To breathe, to draw in air
without a care, to have you near and not fear
your breath, your life as death. I miss cheeks
and chins. Frowns and grins. Staring at a face
held by the hands of a book. Looking over
at someone whose mind has wandered,
the moment they see me seeing them return,
the smile of recognizing lost and found
in each other. Breathe. Grieve. Seethe.
Live. Love. “A breath thou art.” A breath
and a lean, a look. A weight of eyes and hair.
The pause in your goodbyes. How your lips
let go of words. Everything we do is rooted in,
is a branch of breath. Some of us are afraid
of breath and I am killed by this new style
of death, distanced and alone. Have you Zoom
funeraled yet? Been a ghost in a box
mourning a ghost in a box? I cry
for those I couldn’t sprinkle soil upon.
I want an end. I want to love. To dig them up
and apologize for their untouched goodbyes.
What say you God, besides “So what?”
I miss what I never thought I would: human.

About the Author

Bob Hicok’s eleventh collection, Water Look Away, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he’s also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes, and his poems have been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry.

Read more

Praise for Bob Hicok

“What Hicok’s getting at 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… Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this world, we can, too. Highly recommended for a wide range of readers.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Hicok’s poems about mortality and loss take on a vibrancy of their own, with a rhythm and humor that seems to fall into place by mere, desperate momentum.”—Publishers Weekly