Synopses & Reviews
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
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“Doty is always searching for beauty in a world that can be tragic or simply mundane.” Newsday
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“Doty is terrifically precise as he inspects times wreckage…The rhythm of his lines, its syntactical genius, propels us down the page, stopping time when necessary, making the familiar…exotic.” Dallas Morning News
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“Mark Doty still finds wonder in a world of confusion and hardships...a much-needed book of new and selected older poems by Doty.” Time Out New York
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“Dotys facility with his chosen form...is so natural that the craft in his work is all but invisible; he makes the damnably difficult look deceptively simple.” Booklist
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“[Doty] uses language as a way to highlight a moment, elevate it, and unearth hidden depth and meaning...Striking imagery and a powerful imagination are two of his best tools...” Christian Science Monitor
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“...showcases Dotys abiding fondness for examining the human condition” Washington Post Book World
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“If words this moving do not constitute great poetry, Id like to know what does.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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“Doty displays a gift for interweaving arresting image with tender narrative.” Slate
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“FIRE TO FIRE should solidify Dotys position as a star of contemporary American poetry…The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence.” Publishers Weekly (Boxed Signature Review by Reginald Shepherd)
About the Author
Mark Doty has been honored with a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Whiting Writers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. His most recent book, Dog Years, was a New York Times bestseller. He is a professor at the University of Houston and lives in New York City.