Kirjahaku

The name of the title poem—“Brother Salvage: a genizah,” provides a skeleton key to unlock the powerful forces that bind Rick Hilles’s collection. A genizah is a depository, or hiding place, for sacred texts. It performs a double function: to keep hallowed objects safe and to prevent more destructive forces from circulating and causing further harm. Brother Salvage serves exactly this purpose. The poems are heartrending and incisive, preserving stories and lives that should not be forgotten. Yet, through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images are beautifully and luminously contained. Like scholars sifting through ancient genizahs in search of spiritual and historical insights, readers immersed in Brother Salvage will find, at the heart of the book, the most sacred entity: hope.

Rick Hilles's My Roberto Clemente begins with an invigorating homage to a childhood baseball idol and legend and ends with an appreciation to an anonymous man (possibly a retired circus clown or sideshow freak) feeding pigeons in Washington Square Park who sits as "still as any public statuary...as if any one of/our blue lives depend upon it." And how much our lives depend on the many discovered mercies-small and large-that this poet brings to our fortunate and ultimately grateful attention in My Roberto Clemente.