My Alexandria

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honours include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

"The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing; the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry. If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music" -- Philip Levine "Doty is at the height of his powers in these beautiful and important poems" Harvard Review "My Alexandria is built around impermanence and doom, and though AIDS is a pervasive metaphor, the crystalline sensibility and breathtaking beauty of these poems is redemptive (on several levels) rather than depressive" Los Angeles Times Book Review "Mark Doty was quite new to me: I found his work utterly moving and convincing, with not a word detracting from its natural, unassuming eloquence. The shadow of HIV diagnosis hangs over many of the troubled poems in My Alexandria, but Doty's thinking gets to the heart of his feeling, and a brilliance of conception and phrase has the reader thinking too. These are big, serious poems, the best I have read for some time. Do buy this one" John Fuller "My Alexandria is a rare event. These poems are full of light and sensual detail. They tell the story of the perceived world with uncanny lyric accuracy, whether describing a jellyfish or the colour of a garden in the afternoon. Yet their true power is in making us know that such reports have been brought back from the very edge of an abyss: from a zone of fear and loss where every thing loved is at risk and all language begins as elegy. Mark Doty makes these poems not just a chronicle of our contemporary world. He makes them an ethical storm centre in contemporary poetry as well. These are wonderful, accusing and essential poems. They belong to everyone who loves poetry" Eavan Boland