All of You on the Good Earth
 “‘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 makesAll of You on the Good Earthsuch 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 is one of our best rhymers since Robert Frost, and his poems have been compared by superb poets to those of John Berryman and Robert Lowell. We haven’t had a poetry like his—both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding—to enjoy and mull over for a long time.”—Alice Quinn “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 ofAmerican Errancy: Empire, Sublimity, and Modern Poetry“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 ofHeavenandHarlot“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 Earthis a wonder of a book, and Hilbert’s best yet.”—Timothy Donnelly, author ofThe Cloud Corporation, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award