Book Description

Ernest Hilbert's third collection of poems, Caligulan, is at once terrifying and touching, a book haunted by the poet's many affections and angers, its poems animated by horror films, military history, science fiction novels, heavy metal and opera, crime and religion, economic injustice and the natural world. Departing from the experimental sonnet forms he pioneered in his earlier books, Hilbert delivers a chorus of poems that are conversational yet bizarre, stormy and surreal yet dexterously accomplished; brash, abrupt, and sometimes scathingly sarcastic. In four chapters of fourteen poems each, Hilbert leads the reader through modern America's triumphs and tragedies, elusive consolations and primeval horrors, all the while telling jokes, posing questions, and sounding warnings of things to come. Caligulan is heartrending and humorous, filled with love songs and requiems, meditations and memorials, as Hilbert imagines the ghost of the ruthless Roman emperor Caligula--who ruled over a pagan empire that was as prosperous as it was unaccountably cruel--looming over modern America, pronouncing his infamous commandment that his victims be killed slowly, "so that they know they are dying." Caligula's unpredictable violence is mirrored in the infinite humiliations, reverses, and injuries of contemporary life experienced in these pages as our guide points us toward a course of renewal and reconciliation. Caligulan is a masterful new collection from a commanding and original poetic voice.