This collection contains the first published and publicly appreciated poems of Elizabeth Socolow's life as a poet. They led up to her writing and winning the Barnard Poetry Prize in 1987 for Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton. Many of them are in the voice of known characters (persona poems)- Jocasta, Ophelia, Cleopatra-or addressed to famous figures such as Homer. These pieces move back and forth between a kind of easy, mostly celebratory address to friends, the "Summer Porches" of the title and the unfinished meditations on public characters or statues or situations. A few, such as "If Augustine Had Been a Woman" or "Why Call a Dog Brooklyn, He Asked" turn the received world around, so that there is a playfulness and surprise the reader comes to expect.