Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems...

Ernest Hilbert s newest poetry collection, Caligulan is heartrending and humorous, filled with love songs and requiems, meditations and memorials, as the poet imagines the ghost of the ruthless Roman emperor Caligula who ruled over a pagan empire as prosperous as it was unaccountably cruel looming over modern America, pronouncing his infamous commandment that his victims be killed slowly, so that they know they are dying. Caligulan is at once terrifying and touching, a book haunted by the poet s many affections and angers, its poems animated by horror films and science fiction novels, heavy...

In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert’s eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling the irresistible pull of water—what Melville called “the ungraspable phantom of life.”