Ernest Hilbert

Ernest Hilbert is a poet, librettist, critic, and rare book dealer resident in Philadelphia. Hilbert’s poems have appeared in Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, Verse, The New Criterion, Seneca Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, Oxonian Review, and the London Review, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2018), the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2011), The Incredible Sestina Anthology (2013), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). Hilbert has written about books for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, Fine Books & Collections, and The Hopkins Review.

His debut poetry collection Sixty Sonnets (2009) was described by X. J. Kennedy as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.” His second collection, All of You on the Good Earth (2013), has been hailed as a “wonder of a book,” “original and essential,” an example of “sheer mastery of poetic form,” containing “some of the most elegant poems in American literature since the loss of Anthony Hecht.” His third collection, Caligulan (2015), has been called “brutal yet beautiful,” defined by “pleasure, clarity, and discipline,” “tough-minded and precise,” filled with a “stern, witty, and often poignant music,” “a page-turner in a way most poetry books can never be,” and “an honest book for dishonest times.” Caligulan was selected as the winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize. His fourth collection, Last One Out (2019), has been described as “a book haunted by loss,” “elegant and athletic, eloquent and brave, deeply thought and felt,” “human and moving.” Ilya Kaminsky declared that “Last One Out is a very beautiful book . . . it sings.” A. E. Stallings wrote of the book that “a certain amount of youthful edge and swagger has been worn away, but is replaced by mastery, depth, and mellowed sweetness.” His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and appeared in 2023.