Background
He grew up in Riverside, California, and earned his Bachelor at the University of California, Riverside.
( In Imperial, George Bilgere’s sixth collection of poetr...)
In Imperial, George Bilgere’s sixth collection of poetry, he continues his exploration of the beauties, mysteries, and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in mid-America. In poems that range from the Cold War anxieties of the 1950s to the perils and predicaments of an aging Boomer in a post-9/11 world, Bilgere’s rueful humor and slippery syntax become a trapdoor that at any moment can plunge the reader into the abyss. In Bilgere’s world a yo-yo morphs into an emblem for the atomic bomb. A spot of cancer flames into the Vietnam War. And the death of a baseball player reminds us, in this age of disbelief, of the importancethe necessityof myth.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822962683/?tag=2022091-20
( Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Ha...)
Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire is a well-polished collection from a highly accomplished poet. With humor, compassion, and an unflinching eye, Bilgere explores the human condition in accessible lines and a magician's way with language. In images bright and dark, tangible and immanent, Bilgere brings us time after time to the inner reaches of a contemporary life. In subjects ranging from adolescent agony to the loss of parents to the comic pain of middle age, he finds no reason to turn away his gaze, and ultimately no reason not to define himself in joy Haywire was chosen for the Swenson Award by poet Edward Field, winner of numerous awards and a personal friend of the late May Swenson. Field describes the book this way. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn’t fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874216478/?tag=2022091-20
He grew up in Riverside, California, and earned his Bachelor at the University of California, Riverside.
He received his Master of Arts in English Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in contemporary British and American Poetry from the University of Denver in 1988.
Bilgere has received grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ohio Arts Council. In 1991 he was a Fulbright scholar in Bilbao, Spain. In 2002 was named a Witter Bynner Fellow through the Library of Congress by United States. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.
Billy Collins has called Bilgere"s work "a welcome breath of fresh, American air in the house of contemporary poetry."
Bilgere has given poetry readings at the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y in New York, and at universities and arts centers around the country.
He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at John Carroll University. He also hosts "Wordplay", a spoken-word radio program on WJCU that has been called "the Carolina Talk of poetry."
His poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Agni, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner.
His poems appear frequently on Garrison Keillor’s National Public Radio program, The Writer"s Almanac, and in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Bilgere has been a featured guest on Garrison Keillor"s "A Prairie Home Companion."
Michael Salinger, reviewing a reading from his 2010 book The White Museum, called Bilgere "dangerously clever" and said "Bilgere’s work is deceptively simple.
The accessibility that is so often frowned upon by "serious" poetry instructors invites readers into Georges world of cafes where everyday observations take on archetypal importance." John Freeman, writing in the Plain Dealer, said of Imperial, "Manipulating a reader’s pace with punctuation, or lack thereof, Bilgere gives us the sense we’re not just there—we’re him, watching.
Time speeds up, accelerates, and then it’s past
( In Imperial, George Bilgere’s sixth collection of poetr...)
( Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Ha...)
