3/30: George Bilgere at Mac's Backs

George Bilgere’s new book, The White Museum, continues in the same vein that earned him fans in Garrison Keillor (who’s read his poems on NPR) and former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins (who awarded The Good Kiss the Akron University Poetry Prize in 2001). Bilgere’s hallmark is capturing moments of domesticity and progress through middle age in ways most people can understand. In the poem “Zero,” he wakes up during cold weather and realizes what so many men have: He never brought the grill in for the winter and it’s now covered in snow. Meanwhile, his partner’s robe opens periodically: “This wasn’t the barbarians at the gate,” he writes. “It wasn’t Carthage in flames, or even/the Donner Party. But it was zero, by God/and the robe fell open.” Bilgere reads from The White Museum at 7 p.m. at Mac’s Backs Books (1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Hts., 216.321.2665). It’s free. — Michael Gill