The seven stories in Pam Durban's widely praised debut collection are tales of family, of love and loss, of survival and affirmation. Durban's resonant prose subtly obliges her readers to experience the rush of icy water in a stream, the taste of greens freshly snatched from an overgrown garden, the dread weight of confusion and uncertainty. In "This Heat," the opening story, a mill worker faces the long-expected loss of her teenage son when his weak heart finally gives out. In the title story, which concludes the collection, a formidably eccentric woman abruptly leaves her daughter and granddaughter to answer a "calling" to do missionary work in Africa. Framed between these two stories is a gathering of characters made real and consequential by Durban's touch: a country singer more than a few big breaks short of stardom, a preadolescent boy lovestruck over his private swimming instructor, a father cut off from his children by haunting war memories, and others.

Bruce Duffy's first novel, The World As I Found It, was universally acclaimed as "astonishing," "spectacular," "vivid, passionate and funny." A dream debut, it raised the stakes for his second book irrationally high. To his credit, Duffy decided to write an entirely different story, a book that is tender, compassionate, vaguely autobiographical, set squarely in the sixties, and told through the eyes of a precocious, articulate and unforgettable twelve year old boy. This is no mean feat, for twelve year old boys, especially ones from dysfunctional Catholic families, growing up in the straitlaced suburbs of Maryland, are not always the best narrators. But in Frank, who observes the world with a wry detachment and a wise sense of what is right, wrong, and just plain cockeyed, we encounter a voice that says more about race, class, gender, even sex, than anyone since Salinger. Like Twain's Huckleberry Finn, another book set "forty or fifty years ago," Duffy understands that there was never an end to American innocence because there never was an innocence to end. And like Huck, Frank has his own adventures; a trip into the Southern heartland with Loomis, a latter-day Artful Dodger, and Sheppy, an older black boy who seems ready to explode at any minute. Full of character, nuance, and adventure, this is not an easy novel, but it is a brilliant one, a book you won't soon get out of your head.

The first two published collections of award-winning poet Mark Doty are brought together in this new edition.

Mark Doty's first collection of poetry.

From the award-winning author of Heaven's Coast, Atlantis, and My Alexandria comes an intensely lyrical, passionate, and joyful collection of poems. This assemblage visualizes the body as the sweet machine, a vibrant, sensual, and living thing.

From Mark Doty, one of our finest poets, a delicate and sensual literary essay. Part memoir, part art history, part meditation, this hybrid volume uses the great Dutch still life paintings of the seventeenth century as a departure point for an examination of questions about our relationships with things, how we invest them with human store, how they hold feeling and hope and history within them.

This bold, wide-ranging collection—Doty's sixth book of poems—demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. They offer a complex, boldly colored self-portrait; their muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit; they pulse with the drama of perception and the quest to forge meaning.

With School of the Arts, Mark Doty's darkly graceful seventh collection, the poet reinvents his own voice at midlife, finding his way through a troubled passage. At once witty and disconsolate—formally inventive, acutely attentive, insistently alive—this is a book of fierce vulnerability that explores the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire in a world that constantly renews itself.

Back when we were both very young, Godine had the honor of publishing the first two poetry books of Mark Doty, who has since gone on to considerable and deserved fame and fortune, winning the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008, as well as honors from the National Book Critics Circle, the LA Times Book Prize, a Whiting Award, and (as the first American in its history) the T.S.Eliot Prize. Here, reset and containing almost two dozen poems that appeared in small magazines but have never before been collected, are the complete texts of Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight to which Doty has contributed a new introduction. Essentially a new book, and important both for its history and its new inclusions.

Murano, a recent work by the distinguished American poet Mark Doty, is a contemplative meditation on human mortality and the mystery of artistic creation. Addressed to his late friend, the poet Lynda Hull, the musings in Murano are set against the backdrop of Venice and the glassmaker's art, as practiced for centuries on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon. This moving poem is illustrated with details of sixteen pieces of dazzling Murano glass from the collection of the Getty Museum. These fine, delicate objects paired with Doty's stirring words create an exceptional visual and verbal experience.