Personal Geography, Poems by Bill Glose

Personal Geography is a lyrical rumination of the author’s life so far, including poems from childhood days on military bases, wartime experiences in Iraq, and work in factories. The book’s three sections arrange life as if occurring in a single week: "Rainy Monday" doused with melancholy, "Date Night" blooming with passion, and "Weekends at the Coffeehouse" reposing in artful reflection. Filled in equal parts with intellectual curiosity, whimsy, and desire, Bill Glose’s poems will leave readers asking questions about their own personal journies.

Sample Poems by Bill Glose

“In his third collection Bill Glose self-describes his new book as a ‘Universe condensed to a beating/ heart inside a beating heart.’ Thereby Personal Geography recreates one person’s history in a voice that ramifies to the universal. With a deft pen, the poet exhumes the past—childhood’s lessons, a soldier’s hardened heart, early and late love—in apt descriptions rife with contrast and paradox. Innocence and experience, hope and cynicism are equally performed in these imagery rich, artfully crafted poems, yet in the closing section Glose comes full circle, able to discard ‘the freight of war’ and ‘let [his] heart be bared.’” —Jane Ellen Glasser

“Bill Glose’s images of war are immediately riveting—’rotor wash and sand filling throats,’ the endless haunting by ‘shadowy forms’ of prisoners ‘Sitting cross-legged behind triple strands of concertina’—but this volume of personal exploration opens many other vistas, some fanciful, others lonely, but all honest and often tender. And then there is the satisfaction of sudden leaps and disarming simplicity. ‘Volume / is on vacation,’ declares the exuberant ‘Snow Days.’ More somberly, the emotionally devastating ‘Never on Leap Year’ longs for ‘an invisible day’ every year when ‘no one dies / anywhere / on the planet.’” —Jay Paul

“Personal Geography is not a war story, but the pain and reality of combat in the hands of such a skilled writer as Bill Glose cannot be ignored. He deftly parallels recovering from combat with recovering from failed love affairs. If all men shared the sentiments expressed in ‘Every Woman Deserves a Poem,’ what a different world it would be. Glose writes with passion, clarity, and honesty; his work is accessible to all.”— Edward W. Lull

ISBN-13: 978-1625491688, 92 pages, $18

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