“Donna Hilbert’s poems are brave, unsparing and heartfelt revealing a woman’s life in a way that is universal. Her voice is confident and dodges nothing. Her poems don’t waste a word. One wants to say “Yes.” One wants to say “Sister.””
—Joan Colby, author of Carnival
“It makes sense that Donna Hilbert’s Gravity: New and Selected Poems begins with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens. After all, like Stevens, Hilbert’s supreme gift as a poet is to locate in everyday domesticit—a young mother preparing breakfast for her children, two lovers sitting on the patio and reading the newspaper—a spiritual beauty that reminds us of the abiding mysteries of the universe. All of which means that this is a collection guaranteed to make us look again at the world we inhabit, and to remind ourselves that, as Hilbert writes, “all that is lost in winter/each spring returns to claim.””
—Kareem Tayyar, author of Magic Carpet Poems and In the Footsteps of the Silver King
Donna Hilbert’s earlier books include The Congress of Luminous Bodies (Aortic Books); The Green Season, poems, stories and essays from World Parade Books; Mansions and Deep Red (Event Horizon); and Transforming Matter and Traveler in Paradise, both from PEARL Editions. She has poems online at A Year of Being Here, Little Eagle’s RE/VERSE, Zocalo Public Square, Your Daily Poem, Serving House Journal, and, monthly, as a contributing writer at Verse-Virtual. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently in Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books). She has led workshops for both beginners and professional writers in venues as varied as a men’s prison, an English public school, and literary programs including Aldeburgh Poetry and Ilkley Literature Festivals in the UK, and PEN Center USA West’s Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows. She writes and leads private workshops in Long Beach, California, where she makes her home.
