Moonstone Poetry Readings

Wednesday April 12, 2023 – 7:00pm – LIVE

Live at Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom Street and on zoom

Registration Required for zoom – use this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcocuqsqzkuHdOJFz8Z28iwB70Roo7UdsWx

Join us for the Philadelphia launch of Ernest Hilbert’s new collection of poems

Storm Swimmer (Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry)

In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert’s eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling the irresistible pull of water—what Melville called “the ungraspable phantom of life.”

“Ernest Hilbert’s Storm Swimmer is a gleaming cornucopia of dreams, nightmares, tenderness, and grace. It is a book of great feeling and of great technical skill. Everything in it is sacrificed for poetry, which is why everything in this beautiful book lives.”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Heaven and judge

Copies of the book will be available at a discounted rate of $10. Join us!

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan, and Last One Out. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer. His poem “Mars Ultor” was included in Best American Poetry 2018, and his poems appear in Yale Review, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, and the London Review.

Guest reader April Lindner is the author of Skin, which received the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press, and This Bed Our Bodies Shaped. With Ryan Wilson, she is co-editing an anthology of contemporary Catholic poetry for Paraclete Press, and with R. S. Gwynn, she co-edited Contemporary American Poetry in Longman’s Penguin Pocket Academics series. She has written three Young Adult novels, and is a professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, she lives in Stockton, New Jersey.

Guest reader David Hale Sylvester chronicles his adventures and achievements in two books, Traveling at the Speed of Life, which appeared in 2011, and One Hug at a Time: 99 Stories From the Man Who Embraced the World, published in 2021. You can learn more about him at www.davidhalesylvester.com.

Host John Wall Barger’s poems and critical writing have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry Ireland Review, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Smog Mother is his latest book, he teaches Creative Writing at UArts in Philadelphia.