Brother Salvage Book

Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.

Library Journal

Hilles attempts to conjure what is lost from what is found, acknowledging that the artifact is "the cracked handblown glass, / and not its maker." His first full-length collection, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, presents its title poem as a genizah, Hebrew for a hiding place for scriptures both holy and heretical. The poem, based on a Holocaust memoir, Seven Hells, by Dr. Tadzik Stabholz, dramatizes the time Stabholz spent in Dachau with a companion who did not survive, "a man neither brother nor relative." Recalling Richard Howard's admired dramatic monologs, Hilles's work unearths and reinvents its characters (historical pieces are interspersed with love poems and sequences that include "Flashlight Stories," a family recollection). In one poem, Egon Schiele speaks from his prison cell; in another, Catherine Blake, the widow of William, touchingly acknowledges that she is finally able to share her late husband's ecstatic visitations by receiving him: "Though/ mostly we speak of how best to market/ His engravings; only seldom do we revel in Eternity." These are rich and gentle poems; a fine debut. E.M. Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.