If Brother Salvage were Rick Hilles’, say, third collection, not his first as it is; if the versatility and dynamism of voice in these poems signaled a poet’s maturation from the safer outings of his youth; if we could’ve foreseen this kind of command of histories and their peculiar narrators, the book would merely astonish. Instead, Rick Hilles has leapt onto poetry’s stage in a debut both transporting and grounding, clever though never once inclined to wink at you.[
Tom Haushalter (2006-12-18). “Brother Salvage (Poems) by Rick Hilles”. Small Spiral Notebook. Archived from the original on 2008-11-21. Retrieved 2009-06-01
Rick Hilles’s first collection, is constructed upon an ambitious intellectual edifice that both grounds and ties together the disparate personal and historical materials of the poems. The books central metaphor is that of the genizah, a Hebrew word for “hiding place,” which an epigraph to the title poem explains is “a depository where old and/or worn-out secular, holy & heretical books are kept inviolate … Genizot serve the twin purpose of protecting what they contain and preventing their more dangerous contents from causing harm.”
Aaron Baker (Summer 2007), “Brother Salvage”, The Southern Review.