Praise for Porridge

Porridge is an outstanding collection of adult fables, remixed lullabies, and ars poeticas. The poem, "Vasko Popa," is the best critique of big data I've read ("The computer wants you to save everything"). "The Promise" delivers a heartrending, mythical coming-of-age tale. Richard Garcia is a superlative fabulist.

—Jillian Weise, author of The Book of Goodbyes

Richard Garcia must have put Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s Fables, and his own journals into a magic sack, swung it three times over his head, and pulled out the shimmering poems of Porridge. In Garcia’s deft prose poems, door after door opens: God and Satan companionably stack invisible squares, in pops Little Red Goldilocks or the Scarecrow, and a snow globe begins speaking. When the floor falls out, I land in the lush language and jazzy rhythms of Garcia’s sentences. I am surprised and delighted by these prose poems. After I read Porridge, I only wanted more.

—Kathleen McGookey, author of Stay

Richard Garcia’s Porridge is a fractious mash-up of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, cartoons, games, dances, popular songs and the Bible—with an occasional nod to the greatest hits of English literature. Imagine Shakespeare, Walt Disney and the Brothers Grimm on a road trip, and you’ll have an idea of the invention, wit, and virtuosity of this mesmerizing collection of prose poems. Garcia’s quirky fables are by turns playful, humorous, and haunting, and Garcia guides us through his dream-like evocations with wonder, charity and aplomb.

 —Gary Young, author of Even So: New & Selected Poems

About the Author

Richard Garcia won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Poetry for Porridge. He is the author of six books of poetry, and his poems have appeared in many journals, such as The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, The Cortland Review  and Ploughshares. His work is also included in many anthologies, among them, The Best of the Prose Poem, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and Best American Poetry 2005. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Mudfish Prize from Mudfish Magazine, the Greensboro Award from the Greensboro Review, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and the Georgetown Prize from the Georgetown Review. He was poet-in-residence at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles for twelve years, where he conducted workshops in art and poetry for hospitalized children. He teaches at the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing program. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, the poet Katherine Williams, and their dog Max.