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