Alex Richardson's 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. br Gilbert Allen, author of Driving to Distraction p 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 fam