SOURCE: Gonzalez, Ray. “Something from Nothing.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (31 October 1993): 12.

In the following review, Gonzalez extols the elegiac poetry in My Alexandria, arguing that Doty manages to find positive truths and beauty amid pain and death.

In his poem “Brilliance,” Mark Doty writes: “In a story I read / A Zen master who'd perfected / his detachment from the things of the world / remembered, at the moment of dying / a deer he used to feed in the park, / and wondered who might care for it, / and at that instant was reborn / in the stummed flesh of a fawn.”

A book like My Alexandria is noted in part because of the current trend in singling out powerful books about AIDS, but also because Doty goes beyond the triumph of the plague to write about life beyond this dark century. In poems such as “Fog,” “Becoming a Meadow,” and “With...