Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy [Paperback]

Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene (The New York Times Book Review) and achingly beautiful (The Boston Globe). InStill Life with Oysters and Lemonhe offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.Books like this, that address the sources of creation and the sources of our humanness, come along once in a decade. -Susan Salter Reynolds,Los Angeles Times

This small book is as wise, sensitive, intense, and affecting as anything I have read in recent years. -Doris Grumbach, author ofFifty Days of Solitude

A gem. -Library Journal

Mark Doty's prose is insistently exploratory, yet every aside, every detour, turns into pertinence, and it all seems effortless, as though the author were wondering, and marveling, aloud. -Bernard Cooper, author ofTruth Serum

A dazzling accomplishment, its radiance bred of lucid attention and acute insight. The subject is the profoundly personal act of perception translated into description. Doty succeeds in rendering this most contemplative of arts-the still life-into a riveting drama. -Patricia Hampl, author ofI Could Tell You StoriesMark Doty is the author of six books of poems and two memoirs,Heaven's CoastandFirebird.A Guggenheim, Ingram-Merrill, and Whiting Fellow, he has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Nonfiction. He teaches at the University of Houston, and divides his time between Houston and Provincetown, Massachusetts.US