poems and photographs by

Anne M. Hicks

Poetry book, 96 pages, $14 cover price

($12 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore)

ISBN: 978-1-59948-216-3

Released: 2009

 Anne Marie Hicks

Though born in Bangor, Maine, Anne Marie Hicks has spent most of her life in the South — the last 19 years in Charlotte, North Carolina. She strives in life and writing to find a balance close to the Mason-Dixon Line.

Anne finds her zen in writing, music, scuba diving, traveling, photography, her pets, and her friends. A writer of poetry and short fiction, her works have appeared in various publications, including Pearl, Thrift Poetic Arts Journal, andKakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets. She is founder, publisher, and editor of the flash prose and short fiction journalmoonShine review.

Anne has a Masters in English from UNC-Charlotte and a BA in English and Journalism from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, Indiana, where she got her first job as Director of External Communications for the Sisters of Providence.

With her photography and poetry, Anne M. Hicks points the reader toward an uneasy, unpredictable future by merging image and word at the very outset, showing us fruit “Almost Ready to Pick” and suggesting the reader to “forget the future…” in the first poem “(I’m) easy.” From there she moves us through loss, pain, and redemption throughout this collection, which made me want to read and reread these poems, as well as contemplate the photos and their significance for both the poet and the reader. She weaves memory, desire, love, anger, humor, and hope into a unique tapestry of honest introspection and observation. This is a collection to encounter and delight in.

–Jonathan K. Rice
Editor/Publisher of Iodine Poetry Journal

Behind every line in these sensual, honest poems lingers the tragic loss of a father. The compelling poems in Floating a Full Boat leave a lump in the reader’s throat — of anguish, of trying to make sense of death — and rise above the hand that has been dealt. These poems are “worth that last note of woe.”

–Maureen Sherbondy
(After the Fairy Tale, Praying at Coffee Shops, The Slow Vanishing)

Poet Anne Hicks must have been thinking of Noah’s Ark when she titled her book Floating a Full Boat. Pairings abound. Well-crafted poems are mated with well-composed photos. Themes run in twos, or multiples thereof. There are at least two poems each about adolescence, sex, suicide, SCUBA diving and killing roaches, but the overarching theme is desire. Hicks writes of “basic wants contained too long” and of being “inebriated with wanting.” Indeed, Floating a Full Boat is filled to the gunwales with desire in various forms both corporeal and ethereal. Read it for the body and the spirit.

–Richard Allen Taylor
Co-editor KAKALAK

November Lament:
Reading Anne Sexton in Me
warm
she said, what a glorious word,
how it rolls
like a lemon drop,
slowly melting,
rubbing the tongue raw.
a face
on the back of a book cover,
familiar as my mother’s,
mask against the clock
running out over the cold
concrete of November.
marvel
i was born four days after her,
the mouth of her lament, years apart,
i feel her grown on me,
in expectations shattered,
suicide, deception, forget.
i’ve awakened
to the scraping of air
through lungs
and reached for another cigarette
and promised twenty years
is enough, to not pass 40
slowed by the tar of anger and doubt.

Never Palm a Card When Playing Poker with God
On the battered porch
where his blood stained the ceiling,

I found the deck of cards he used,
cards smudged by sweat and sleepless nights.

I stole the four aces,
as if I could rig the deck against him,

prevent his death from making sense.
They are a secret memory of him.

He played against the devil or God,
counting on a wild card.

Now I have four bookmarks,
cards with no house.

They mean nothing.

They are the four winds
scattered with his ashes,

the highest four of a kind
drawn in a fixed game.

Four pieces of coated paper
mark my place.

Diving Deep
She plunges into inky depths
parachuting through an endless
blue without a net, frenetic
to find her ilk, her creator.

A daughter of the land,
she bends to cerulean seas,
vanishing beneath in a duet
of passion and purpose.

Her fear, fired by twilight,
feeds a soul void of past
longing in this paper-thin night
of underwater highways

Surfacing, she’s allayed again,
her map of the above lies
in a twisted sky of stars made
alive by moon’s waning.