Porch Night On Walnut Street

Alex Richardsons poems hover between domesticity and wildness, duty and whimsy, contentment and longing, documentation and invention. They will provide experienced readers with highly nuanced pleasures, and they will impress newcomers to contemporary poetry with their initial delights. Gilbert Allen, author of Driving to DistractionTo write of loves 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 Richardsons 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 OHara 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 things for sure: If this nuclear family-poet father, mother, daughter, son-didnt exist somebody else would have to invent them or the poetic universe wouldnt feel complete. Fear not. In this collection Richardson offers up directions for our crazy suburban cultures survival: surprise, delight, ardor, and a smart-assed humor you wont 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 D