For "My Alexandria", the author won the 1995 Eliot Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the "Los Angeles Times" Book Award.
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.
In this luminous study of illness and loss, the acclaimed poet (author of My Alexandria and Atlantis) recounts how his lover of eight years, Wally Roberts, learned from a Vermont social worker in May 1989 that he was HIV-positive (while Doty tested negative). In chapters that range impressionistically over the years that followed, Doty presents a kind of AIDS journal, tracing the gradual onset of the disease to which Roberts succumbed in 1993 and the painful healing process that engulfs Doty to this day. During this period, Doty also lost a close male friend to AIDS and a female friend to a car accident. After the diagnosis, the two men adopted two dogs, bought a cabin in the Vermont woods and, when Roberts began his gradual physical deterioration, moved to Provincetown, Mass., where there was a strong gay and lesbian support network. Mourning Roberts's loss, Doty finds powerful sustenance in poetry, letters from friends (excerpted here) and his own meditations on the New England landscape. Doty's love for Wally and the inner strength that sustains him lend this memoir a vitality that is sure to appeal to readers outside the AIDS community. Author tour. (Mar.)
In retrospect, 1993 should have been a red-letter year for Doty: his fourth collection of poems, My Alexandria (LJ 4/15/93), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award. But that year he also lost his lover to AIDS, a painful story he recounts here.
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