Synopses & Reviews
The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from the author of My Alexandria--1993 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1993 National Book Award Finalist.
Synopsis
In his latest collection, Atlantis, Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a fading paradise whose memory he must keep alive at the same time that he is forced to renounce its hold on him. Atlantis recedes, just as the lives of those Doty loves continue to be extinguished by the devastation of AIDS. Set in the harbor village of Provincetown, whose charming, cluttered landscape Doty brings to life, the collection chronicles the illness and death of Doty's beloved partner, as well as many others whose worlds have been both ravaged and broadened by this disease. Doty's struggle is to reconcile with, and even to celebrate, the evanescence of our earthly connections - to those we love, to the shifting physical landscape, even to our strongest feelings - and to understand how we can love more at the very moment that we must consent to let go.
About the Author
Mark Doty has received many honors for his poetry, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. A National Book Award finalist and two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship he is the only American poet to have won Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize. The author of three prose volumes --
Heaven's Coast,
Firebird, and
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon -- he teaches in the graduate program at the University of Houston. Mr. Doty lives in Houston and in Provincetown.