Blood Pages

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.

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.