Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets (2009). His spoken word album Elegies & Laments, a "soundtrack" to Sixty Sonnets recorded with rock band and orchestra, was issued by Pub Can Records in 2012. He supplies libretti and song texts for contemporary composers Stella Sung, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Christopher LaRosa. He also writes scripts and appears in short films for the post-punk conceptual band Mercury Radio Theater. His poems have appeared in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2011), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He hosts the popular blog www.everseradio.com and works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.
"'Genes clarify the genius and the freak / And prove we descend
from a feral band, ' Ernest Hilbert writes in 'Outsider Art, ' and
there is no mistaking the 'feral' appetite and intensity of these
poems, or the bitter depths of experience they sometimes explore.
What makes All of You on the Good Earth such a rare collection,
however, is the way Hilbert unites that raw energy with elegant and
original language, creating a style that sounds like no one
else's."--Adam Kirsch
"Hilbert has written poems of superb lyricism. It's hard to think
of another poet with such range, and indeed with such brilliant
delivery. Beauty, trash, exaltation, and humor are contained in his
capacious and exacting forms. These are, quite simply, original and
essential poems."--Justin Quinn, author of American Errancy:
Empire, Sublimity, and Modern Poetry
"These sixty new sonnets find Ernest Hilbert, 'an earnest / Pilgrim
of some kind, ' charging up to the ruins of a shared and personal
past as well into the ether of his own (mostly) earthbound head.
Part shaman, part showman, he reaches his hand in, winks, and with
a flourish, produces one little marvel after another. Like Lowell
before him, Hilbert has found in the sonnet a form of confinement
that excites and accommodates a liberality of temperaments,
rhetorics, bad thoughts and big ideas, but where Lowell favored
blank verse, Hilbert surprises with rhymes he unwinds with
preternatural finesse. His material ranges from the all too
familiar to visionary moments in which our debauchery brings us to
'fall apart like ancient stars' or to witness a vaseful of
stargazer lilies 'unfastening like a vast nebula' with a 'long pour
of poisonous gas.' Retrospective, forward-looking, tonic and toxic,
All of You on the Good Earth is a wonder of a book, and Hilbert's
best yet."--Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation,
winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
"Who gets away with rhyming 'looker' and 'fuck her'? Ernest Hilbert
does, that's who. And who among us has a sonnet form named after
them? Why, it's Ernest Hilbert yet again."--Jill Alexander Essbaum,
author of Heaven and Harlot
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
