Mark Doty

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry including, most recently Deep Lane; A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures, and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which received the National Book Award. He has also published three memoirs: Heaven’s Coast, Firebird, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, and Dog Years. He has also edited The Best American Poetry 2012. Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, perennially new American voice and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass (W. W. Norton & Company) Doty keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the iconic poet’s life and work. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. – Jessica Ferri in the Los Angeles Times noted that “What Is the Grass may be the definitive book on Whitman’s life, afterlife and poetry. But it’s [in] the moments in Doty’s own life […] that the book truly glistens.”