Season Tickets - Softcover

Gilmore, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931638012 ISBN 13: 9781931638012

Publisher: Pima Press, 2003

Synopsis

Season Tickets is a collection of three prize-winning stories and twenty-six narrative poems arranged in three parts to tell the story of a life. "Okies" is the story of a boy's relationship with his illiterate father. In "The Student," a young man putting himself through college by working as a night minister in a wedding chapel reflects on his future when, in the middle of his ceremony, a bride he is attracted to has a seizure and the groom flees. "Seabreeze," set in a convalescent hospital, explores love and commitment when a man is challenged by stroke-induced darkness.

Steve Kowit, author of In the Palm of Your Hand, describes the poems in this collection as "crisp, lucid & altogether believable--sometimes hilarious, sometimes chancy and transgressive, often deeply touching." Poems in the first section explore the lesson a boy learns in a group shower, the eroticism of a bowling ball, a mother's religious outrage when the father buys the family's first TV, and a boy's love for a third grade teacher. Poems in the middle section deal with the brittleness of relationships, ineptitude with finding new love, the philosophy of quitting, and fear of ex-wives. The final section celebrates the wisp of understanding that comes with age and praises reference librarians, sushi, a punch in the mouth, gravity, and Friends of the Library sales.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Gilmore, in his time, has been a white trash Okie, a fry cook, a student, a draft dodger, a soldier, a draft counselor, a jazz musician, a starving actor, a minister at a Reno wedding chapel, a graduate student, a psychologist, a man divorced as many times as he has married, a single parent, a college professor teaching statistics, physiological psychology and aesthetics, a college dean, a consultant to business, and, more recently, a full-time writer trying to make sense out of an essentially random but full life.

Review

"...fierce and memorable...the kind of book one stays up late at night reading." -- Steve Kowit, author of In the Palm of Your Hand

"Gilmore takes us to Eden and back, exploring what it is to be a mortal human...a wild trip..." -- Meg Files, author of Meridian 144

About this edition

• Publisher: Pima Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1931638012
• ISBN 13: 9781931638012
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 108