Sweet Machine: Poems - Hardcover

Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.

"Having published the first poem and the last, I thoughthaving read the old poems tooI had known what to expect, but the senses are always new, and Doty's loyalty to them, and to the sense they make, continues to astonish, to enlighten, to console." -- Richard Howard

"Mark Doty says, 'What I love about language/is what I love about fog:/what comes between us and things/grants them shine.' What comes between Mark Doty and the things in Sweet Machine is the sheerest translucent membrane of regard, the astonishing gloss of his eye's sweep and pinpointhis luminous language. Nothing escapes his gaze and nothingdeath, devastation, the ghost of a gestureescapes its sheer insistence on beauty, the world 'lustered by the veil.' Mark Doty is a master, re-painting our sad daily canvas, heightening the gold light, the diffusion, the shocked shattered glass and the artificial bath of attitude, letting us see it all arrayed, as he says, under the 'uncompromising vault of heaven.'" -- Carol Muske

"Strange paradise, complete with worms', Mark Doty begins a poem. In four collections of poetry, this masterful poet writes elegies so full of life we find our hope restored. Moving, splendidly observant and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric poem." -- Citation for the Writer Bynner Prize for Poetry awared by the American Academy of Arts and Letters

These are poems of ardour and playfulness.... an ongoing celebration ... Perhaps he has relaxed too much, even allowing himself to be self-indulgent.... -- The Economist