This one is for all the aging fuck-ups,
The guys who can’t get their shit in one bag,
Can’t find a job much less get there on time.
They struggle to grind tires out of deep ruts,
But they slide back in. They will always lag
In the long race, skid down while others climb.
There are, as a rule, women, kids, and pets
Who learn not to depend on them so much,
Who go on with their lives, nurse their grudges.
What keeps these men from growing up? What gets
Dropped behind them? Something must make them flinch
From life’s harsh contours, its many judges:
As if they prefer to remain children,
More loved, and more easily forgiven.

Publisher’s Announcement

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 (“My love, we know how species run extinct”), satires (“The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy”), elegies (The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut”), and songs of sorrow (“Seasons start slowly. They end that way too”). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence—ABCABCDEFDEFGG—allows the author to dust off of the Italian “little song” and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona (“We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint”), at times in the voice of both male and female characters (“I’m sorry I left you that day at MoMA”), at times across historical gulfs (“Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone”), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing “the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.”