A Meal Like That

With his uncommon common sense, Albert Garcia makes readers stop and pay attention. Again and again reading this collection I found myself halted by the simple astuteness of an observation, "before I knew love is pain / wrapped in shining paper . . . ." His unlikely choices of words or images often seem somehow exactly correct, once his context is studied, "your hair plumed like ink from a squid." Best of all, an ongoing sense of wonder at life itself pervades these singular expressions of mortality and more.

-Gerald Haslam, author of Coming of Age in California and Grace Period

With extraordinary attentiveness to the world around us, Albert Garcia explores the important questions: How to find equilibrium in a universe where Isaiah's wolf and lamb do not dwell peacefully beside each other-where "just the idea of standing on a volcano's shoulder...makes you brace for balance"-where awareness means accepting the fragility and underside of each moment.

I am grateful for Garcia's wise, humane and wide-awake look into these complexities-of daily life, of marriage, of personal and global history-that enlarges us with its insightful and compassionate clarity.

--Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of The Fortunate Islands

Who wouldn't love A Meal Like That, a moment we look back on when the complexities of our family life and our own often-bewildering inner life mingle at a table, and we are happy and sated, if sometimes a bit unsettled? Over the years, Albert Garcia has become a master at isolating such intimate, revealing moments of wonder, and then evoking them in his well-crafted and graceful poems. In this collection, those moments are divided between memories of a boy growing up on a ranch in the Sacramento Valley and those of a young family man living in that same valley. His voice is quiet and his word choices are unpretentious, but make no mistake, this is a poet who offers up the best fare, poems that satisfy and that will endure. Take a place at the table, and may we offer you "Cussing in the 4th Grade," "Dig," "Early Morning, Studying Art," or a little "November Task"?

-Gary Thompson, author of One Thing After Another