Making Bones Walk is the first full-length collection for Toronto poet Alex Boyd. It’s a promising debut, solid, trim, and occasionally arresting (especially “Twenty Three Minutes for Everything,” the one standout poem in the book), but it also bears several of the flaws one expects in a first book. While it’s refreshing to see a civic sensibility in poetry, Boyd’s more overt political statements tend toward prosaic banality and preachiness. He fares much better when he serves this up with a sidespin of imagery, metaphor, and quirky humour. There’s nothing radical on offer, mostly well-turned free verse built from standard sentences, making it something of a “safe” collection. It would be nice to see Boyd’s already keen eye and well-attuned ear serving more demanding structures and more daring leaps of syntax and sound.