An Evening of New Poetry
with Ernest Hilbert and Anna Evans

Free and open to the public

Monday, May 11th, 7:30PM

Princeton Public Library

65 Witherspoon St

Princeton, New Jersey 08542

(609) 924-9529

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Richard Stockton College of NJ. Her new sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is available from White Violet Press. Visit her online at www.annamevans.com.

“If Verse Forms Were Superheroes . . .” by Anna Evans

The villanelle is Batman, suave and dark,
a bit self-conscious of his repetends.
The sestina’s Ironman—like Tony Stark
he loves himself and irritates his friends.
The pantoum’s Tarzan, always getting by
on half the words because of twice the muscle.
You’ll really believe the triolet can fly,
but don’t ask me why Spiderman’s a ghazal.

Yet who do they all turn to when the day
needs saving? Nothing tending to repeat.
They need a subtle form who knows the way
to strategize, who’s dainty on her feet.
A sexy form who’s always got your back—
the Catwoman sonnet, svelte in skintight black.

* * *

Ernest Hilbert’s debut 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 book, Caligulan, will be issued in hardcover in September. He works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist. You can visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.

“Between Sides Seven and Eight of Die Walküre” by Ernest Hilbert

STEREO OSA-1509, London, FFrr

The time between a side is like a tide
Of silence between epochs, the stereo
A small shrine concealed in a black alpine
Bergschrund beneath snow-white blinds that hide
The ceremony’s indigo vacuum-tube glow.
Silence is always the source of the Rhine.
Brushing off dust, stray hairs, remnants of life,
Brief interval in the deeps—between the blows
Of hunters’ horns that summon blood-red light,
Cold trills that instill a chill of coming strife—
Tender rise of the silver arm: the stylus, slow
As seasons, lowers its blade . . . and the flight
Stirs from the night the descending daughters
And glides and sings upon the black waters.