National Book Award-Winning poet Mark Doty will be reading from his latest collection, Deep Lane: Poems (Norton $25.95) at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, April 22, at 6 p.m.

The National Book Award citation for Mr. Doty’s Fire to Fire reads, “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems … invite us to share their ferocious compassion.”

Says Poet Gerald Stern: “Mark Doty writes with absolute exactitude, with one eye on the ideal or absolute and one on the real; the ghost of Walt Whitman on one hand, and a laundromat on 16th Street in New York on the other. There is not a finer, more delicate, more sublime poet writing today in the English language. It’s a poet’s job to show us what we knew but never saw before; and it’s a poet’s job to tell us over and over what love is. Doty is this poet.”

According to poet Mary Oliver, “One of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty’s work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase, of whatever issue, which leads him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning within the human story. It might be the color of the inside of a shell of a mussel found on the beach; it might be the recognition that the heart that feels close to dying might not die, if the will can be fed just a little.”

Mark Doty is the author of eight previous books of poetry and four books of prose. In addition to the National Book Award, his honors include National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University.