Blood Pages - (Pitt Poetry) by George Bilgere (Paperback)

About the Book

George Bilgere continues his exploration of the joys and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in the Midwest. OK, maybe he's a bit beyond middle-aged at this point, and his rueful awareness of this makes these poems even more darkly hilarious, more deeply aware of the feckless and baffling times our nation has stumbled into. Blood Pages is a guidebook to the fears, foibles, and beauties of our lovely old country as it makes its blundering, tentative way into the new century.

Book Synopsis

In Blood Pages George Bilgere continues his exploration of the joys and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in the Midwest. OK, maybe he's a bit beyond middle-aged at this point, and his rueful awareness of this makes these poems even more darkly hilarious, more deeply aware of the feckless and baffling times our nation has stumbled into. And the fact that Bilgere, relatively late in life, is now the father of two young boys brings a fresh sense of urgency to his work. Blood Pages is a guidebook to the fears, foibles, and beauties of our lovely old country as it makes its blundering, tentative way into the new century.

Review Quotes

Bilgere studies the fuzzy math of our circumstance by tallying the mini-thrills of our app-happy culture, enumerating the conditions of unconditional love, acknowledging the way our distractions subtract us from even our simplest interactions. His speakers resemble Bilgere the poet, with at least one important difference: the poet is always a step ahead of them in burlesquing their self-righteous ires, fantasies, and denial of aging and mortality. Several steps ahead. . . . Part of the fun is in trying to ascertain how many.-- "J. Allyn Rosser"

George Bilgere's done it again with Blood Pages. He peels back the layers of artifice to uncover our pulsing hearts working to sort out and survive the everyday struggles and absurdities of being human. With self-deprecating humor, with unwavering empathy, and with hard-earned clarity, he is one of our finest poets, and this is one of his finest books. I simply can't get enough of the poems of George Bilgere.-- "Jim Daniels"

The poems in Blood Pages typically arise out of the everyday, such as eating pancakes, a scene at Starbucks, and nostalgia for an old TV set. The wonder here is that Bilgere is able to evince from these poems moments of human pathos as affecting as the ones found in his poems on more serious subjects--a mother's death, a father's violence, and childbirth. Bilgere is that rare poet who can be as funny or as serious as he wants to be--often at the same time.-- "Billy Collins"

About the Author

George Bilgere is professor of English literature at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and has received grants and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Society of Midland Authors award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He spends his summers in Berlin, Germany, but lives during the academic year in Cleveland with his wife and two sons.