Mark Doty wins a National Book Award

It's always great when one of your favorite living poets receives the recognition you believe he so richly deserves. This happened for me this week when Mark Doty won a National Book Award for his most recent collection Fire to Fire. Congrats Mark! I can still remember meeting him for the first time back in college. I guess I've been reading his work for nearly twenty years now. Um, I mean five, yes, five years now. :)

Here's what the National Book Foundation said about his work:

Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.