Winner of the 2006 Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire, by George Bilgere, is a collection of poems from an accomplished poet with a direct and unpretentious voice. 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.