Gilbert Allen, author of Driving to Distraction To write of love's impossibility is, in many ways, a piece of cake. The poet is a beautiful loser, the poems glamorous with sadness. In Porch Night on Walnut Street, Alex Richardson takes on a subject more complex and various: an imperfect happiness. In language that manages to be both absolutely relaxed and achingly precise, the poems explore the texture of family life: its inception between lovers who are at first their own cosmos, but soon find themselves parents entrusted to an ordinary, scary miracle: people in the making. In Richardson's wise and wry vision, diminishment loses to possibility, and we witness the unfolding of a comic and splendid family romance, a pattern of lives "held up by holes, by nothing, same as constellations." Angela Ball, author of Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds Had Frank O'Hara followed a heterosexual urge, had Elizabeth Bishop settled in a split-level, had T.S. Eliot stayed watering the lawn in the neighborhoods of St. Louis, they might have ended up writing like Alex Richardson in this first collection Porch Night On Walnut Street. One thing's for sure: If this nuclear family-poet father, mother, daughter, son-didn't exist somebody else would have to invent them or the poetic universe wouldn't feel complete. Fear not. In this collection Richardson offers up directions for our crazy suburban culture's survival: surprise, delight, ardor, and a smart-assed humor you won't see coming like a Little League flyball. Buy an extra copy of this good book and send it to the library of the nearest Baptist church interested in preserving family values. John Lane, author of The Dead Father Poems Alex Richardson's first collection is a "treasure chest of magical balms" and micrometamorphoses-full of delights, his lyrics leave the reader simultaneously off-balance and strangely satisfied as they celebrate the moments between transformations where the narrator experiences the gift of disorientation on many subtle levels. Claire Bateman, author of Clumsy