Skip to main content

Search

X Close

Search

X Close

Home / Newsroom / George Bilgere publishes new book of poetry: Blood Pages
George Bilgere, Ph.D., award-winning poet and John Carroll University  English professor, has published his seventh book of poetry, Blood Pages. In Blood Pages,  George Bilgere continues his exploration of the joys and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in the Midwest. He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and the Fulbright Foundation. He has given readings in venues around the country, including the Library of Congress and the 92nd Street Y in New York. George is a 2014 Creative Workforce Fellow in Literature, a grant funded through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture. The title poem is below: Blood Pages Someone gave my little boy this illustrated book about whales and every day he carries it to me, demanding we read through its pages about the biggest whales, the blue ones, and the fiercest whales, the suave orcas in their tuxes, and the mild sperm whales with their baleen and blow holes and benevolent gaze. Which is fine. Everyone likes whales, but of course being a boy he wants to focus on the “blood pages,” as he calls them, just two of them inserted like an accidental dose of reality in the middle of the book, where the great whales are hauled up like minnows onto the decks of the Japanese trawlers, their strength broken against the diesel winches, blood pouring from the smoking wounds where the harpoons struck and exploded. I want to page forward to the dolphins somersaulting above Sea World, but he wants to see leviathan stripped of his lordliness, skinned alive on an ocean of blood by small men with their scarlet blades, their watch caps and cigarettes, making good money on the long cruise but nonetheless longing for home, for the touch of their wives, for their own children on their laps.