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Book Summary and Reviews of Fire to Fire by Mark Doty

Fire to Fire by Mark Doty

Fire to Fire

New and Selected Poems

by Mark Doty

  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2008, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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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Book Awards

  • award image National Book Awards, 2008

Reviews

Media Reviews

"His narrative style is expansive, filled with what has been described as a "lyric glitter" that creates radiance around the ordinary." - Library Journal.

"Doty satisfies the ear and the mind in much of Fire to Fire. At times his poems become too abstract or overblown, especially the new work. That’s when readers will most appreciate – and miss – his ability to reveal moments that they might otherwise have overlooked .... Yet weaknesses aside, [this work is] not just memorable but necessary." - The Christian Science Monitor.

"Fire to Fire should solidify Doty's 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." - Boxed Signature Review, Publishers Weekly.

"Doty's 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.

This information about Fire to Fire was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Mark Doty Author Biography

Photo: Kenneth Chen

Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with such distinctions as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

Link to Mark Doty's Website

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