Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, 1995. Winner of a Whiting Writers' Award, 1994. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Finalist, National Book Award, 1993. Winner of the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry.This is the first cloth edition of one of the most highly praised and touching collections of poems to appear in recent years. In selecting it for the National Poetry Series, Philip Levine said: ''The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing: the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry. . . . Mark Doty is a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.''''Doty is at the height of his powers in these beautiful and important poems.''--Diann Blakely Shoaf, Harvard Review ''Doty's poems elegize the past and ready us for future grief, focusing intensely on the anticipated death of his lover from AIDS.''--Tony Whedon, Poetry East ''An understated, unflinching look at life in the face of death. The poems are as courageously elegant as the achievement is grand.''--from the National Book Critics Circle Citation ''You'll read it again and again, and you will not lend it out as much as you give it.''--Alexander Chee, San Francisco Review of Books ''Though AIDS is a pervasive metaphor, the crystalline sensibility and breathtaking beauty of these poems is redemptive.''--Marjorie Lewellyn Marks, Los Angeles Times Book Review''Doty is at the height of his powers in these beautiful and important poems.''--Diann Blakely Shoaf, Harvard Review ''Doty's poems elegize the past and ready us for future grief, focusing intensely on the anticipated death of his lover from AIDS.''--Tony Whedon, Poetry EastMark Doty, the recipient of a 1994 Whiting Writers' Award, is the author of two previous books of poetry, Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. His next collection is Atlantis.
Industry Reviews
"It's difficult to choose a single poem from this marvelous book ... so many are radiant creations, virtuoso rhapsodies capable of transforming ordinary despair into something dazzling, like a flock of butterflies turning in sunlight." -- Rita Dove, Poet's Choice, Washington Post Book World "Doty is at the height of his powers in these beautiful and important poems."--Diann Blakely Shoaf, Harvard Review "Doty's poems elegize the past and ready us for future grief, focusing intensely on the anticipated death of his lover from AIDS."--Tony Whedon, Poetry East "An understated, unflinching look at life in the face of death. The poems are as courageously elegant as the achievement is grand."--from the National Book Critics Circle Citation "You'll read it again and again, and you will not lend it out as much as you give it."--Alexander Chee, San Francisco Review of Books "Though AIDS is a pervasive metaphor, the crystalline sensibility and breathtaking beauty of these poems is redemptive."--Marjorie Lewellyn Marks, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Doty is at the height of his powers in these beautiful and important poems."--Diann Blakely Shoaf, Harvard Review
