“I take full responsibility for what happened at Enron. But saying that,
I know in my mind that I did nothing criminal.” – Kenneth Lay

There are worlds I never planned to conquer,
But found myself inflamed by providence.
My famed armies topple your town’s tower.
My great ballistae knock you hard on your
Ass. My knights shit on bed and altar, hence
My glory is accomplished. You cower
As well, I see. No surprise there. You know
My works and feats, racks of birds, fame-deep gold
From far countries, my myriad scions:
Friend of Charlemagne, deft with sword and bow.
Yes, you may pay tribute, kneel, and behold.
I’ll bed your daughters, behead your peons.
Stupor mundi, one of a kind, my works stun
The world, and it’s all so much goddamned fun.

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.”