THE RACONTER presents acclaimed poet MARK DOTY May 27, 2009

The Raconteur Presents

2008 National Book Award Winner
Poet MARK DOTY Reading/Signing FIRE to FIRE

8 PM, Weds. May 27

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and features a hefty selection from his seven collections, plus a generous sheaf of new poems, should solidify Doty's position as a star of contemporary American poetry, a career which took off in 1993 with My Alexandria, his third book, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fire to Fire contains only two poems from his first two books—“Adonis Theatre,” about an old movie palace turned gay porno theater, and “The Death of Antinous,” about the Roman emperor Hadrian's lover's afterlife in statuary, both of which are meditations on representation, absence and desire. Readers are guided through a world of female impersonators, street musicians and homeless poets. There is still an all-pervasive sense of doom in a few of the stanzas, from the dying man who gives away all his animals to the dog shot in the head that refuses to take its final breath, but Doty's death-haunted poems from earlier books give way here to recent poems about a more hopeful life with new friends, new vistas, new narratives, all rendered in a way that feels at once confessional and universal. Not that death’s irrelevant—ghosts and apparitions, such as spotting John Berryman having lunch in a diner in Chelsea, still make regular appearances—but the poet has made his peace with it. FREE. Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.

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