English professor publishes first book of poetry

In “Reassurance in Negative Space,” Hiscox muses with revelatory insights on such wide-ranging topics as multifarious netsuke, nuclear fallout, artichokes “coming into new brilliance,” the DMV line and the Zen of “the sublime [that] can spring from small things.”

“Her poems are tightly, urgently made,” said award-winning poet Nancy Eimers. “Hers is a poetry held together by ingenious double meanings and wordplay, twinnings and twinings, paradox, subtle jokes and puns, fierce and delicate ironies, a rigorous intelligence and a vigor of spirit so charged and fluent that whatever she puts before us takes on resonance and import.”

Fellow award-winning poet Norman Dubie said: “Elizabyth Hiscox’s new collection, ‘Reassurance in Negative Space,’ is haunting in the way that brilliance of mind and vision encounter an almost secret vocabulary. This is the revealing intercession of one road upon another in the outskirts of Rome a hundred years past. It is also the infrared optics of ideas of negative space peering into previously unobserved, undisturbed dark matter. A few of the poems surprise utterly, have almost a pre-creation memory for us of things that startle and seem true. She is a terrific and sometimes very funny poet of the first order.”

In addition to teaching at Western, Hiscox serves as the university’s Director of the Contemporary Writer Series. She served as Poet-in-Residence at Durham University (United Kingdom) and is a recipient of Arizona Commission on the Arts and Vermont Studio Center grants.

Selected for the Seventh Avenue Streetscape public-art initiative, Hiscox’s poetry was displayed on a Phoenix billboard for a year in conjunction with the city’s First Friday art walks. She has taught writing in England, the Czech Republic and Spain. Hiscox holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University.