Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge // that I love every person in this room. I mean it. / We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love / each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except / Harold

How horrible does someone’s relationship with their mother, their childhood, have to be that its description is so much more harrowing than the account of that same person’s serial murders?

I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future / self, the one who has fallen in love.

Billie is the first to sprout breasts in our bunk, her body so coveted amongst our puny group that when she admits to picking her nose, no one says a word about it.

Along one river fell / all the luck in the world.

After the disaster, all our fears subsided, for everything was now destroyed

John White was a good man. Set against the background of braggarts and swindlers that most people turn out to be—once you delve beneath the initial, cheap sheen of tinselly smiles and handshakes—John White was a very good man.

Ernest Hilbert's latest collection, Last One Out, addresses not only our individual mortality, but a kind of “last call” for the world as we know it.

Life is so afflicted by clarity and definition these days that the sensations of mystery and beauty I associated with the mist are even more precious to me.