Bob Hicok's poetry hs appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, as well as twice appearing in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Hicok is the author of two previous collections of poems. His second book, The Legend of Light won the 1995 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was an ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year.

About Animal Soul:

"Animal Soul is the best collection yet by a poet who has become one of the most individual and necessary voices of his generation. An almost prophetic rage seems to inhabit these poems, which present us with a speaker who is tender and brutally rueful by turns. Bob Hicok asks to be a voice of conscience in a conscience-less world. And, like all true prophets, his rage and consternation in the end transform themselves into a form of prayer, what one of his poems calls a 'mad...devotion.' Hicok is able to instruct and console us, and that is a very rare thing indeed."
—David Wojahn

"Bob Hicok's Animal Soul embodies an imagistic world shaped out of the mercy of language and music, and each well-wrought poem is believable in its dreamt and life-honed levity. Animal Soul has been summoned by a craftsman and seer; this is poetry we can trust."
—Yusef Komunyakaa

"Bruised by experience, utterly alert to its desecrations, Bob Hicok's splended new book of poems—wry, witty, acerbic—flashes with a comic holiness, a secret, irrepressible urge to make something sacred out of contemporary life. I am moved and heartened by this skeptical book of descents that keeps seeking ways to find an enchanted light."
—Edward Hirsch