This is the first edition of one of the most highly praised and touching collections of poems to appear in recent years. In selecting it for the National Poetry Series , Philip Levine said: ‘The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing: the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry…Mark Doty is a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music’. Mark Doty, the recipient of a 1994 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of two previous books of poetry, Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight . He is winner of: the T.S. Eliot Prize, 1995; winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, 1994; winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; finalist, National Book Award, 1993; and, winner of the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry.