Still the Animals Enter [Paperback]

“In  ‘Possibly, This Time,’ Jane Hilberry makes a startling and haunting poem out of the passage of a tick through people’s lives and deaths. Is this possible, you ask? Oh, yes, this and much  more. ‘All else, stripped back, came down to love,’ she writes in another poem. Hilberry’s book,Still the Animals Enter, is the record of this stripping down: its glory and its purpose, these poems.”

“The poems inStill the Animals Enterevoke an embodiment both tangential and deep. They travel like a bead on a string between a charged, sublime solitude and a nuanced connection with the natural world and the ‘smooth stone’ of the lover’s body. Hilberry has given us something necessary and rare, an adult perspective that does not lose itself in nostalgia or swerve toward loneliness but finds its way to a language of profound erotic vitality. This collection is located at a powerful edge where memory and loss are in contact with a forward-looking present tense, where longing gives way to a deep quiet ‘among the breathing others,’ and where the animals find their way throughlĂ*