Description: In his autobiography, poet Mark Doty tells the story of how he became aware of his sexual orientation at the age of ten, and of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"With Firebird . . . Doty has written his most satisfying book . . . . [He] has elevated the story of his troubled family to the stature of myth, and in the process he has written an American classic." - Salon
"The poet's beautifully written, halucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." - Newsweek
"Doty writes with the characteristic Zen-calm you find also in his gorgeous poetry." - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A lyrical, heartfelt and ultimately haunting account. . . . It is a pleasure to read a memoir that eschews the outsized dramas of recent confessional volumes. . . .Firebird convincingly evokes the isolation and cruelty of childhood, the potent blend of torment and pride experienced by those who sense, from an early age, that they are different." - Washington Post Book World
"By the end of Mark Doty's exquisite memoir. Firebird, you'll have trouble believing you haven't read a brilliantly plotted novel by a master of fiction. But no made-up story could ever be as gripping as the one Doty tells, And few novelists could tell it this well." - San Francisco Chronicle
"By turns lyrically comic and deeply sad." - Out Magazine
"Supple, powerful reading. . . .[Doty] immerses his readers--at first in a leisurely manner, then with gathering intensity--in a gay coming of age complicated by complete family meltdown." - New York Times Book Review