SOURCE: Wunderlich, Mark. “About Mark Doty.” Ploughshares 25, no. 1 (spring 1999): 183-89.

In the following essay, the author provides a good overview of Doty's life and career up to the publication of Firebird, with a focus on how AIDS effected Doty's personal life, memoirs, and poetry.

A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town's main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet, and gold body paint, the possibilities for human identities seem both fluid and vast. P-town is also a site of incredible natural beauty, but a volatile one. Surrounded on three sides by water, the tip of the Cape is pounded by waves and winter storms, its shape shifting as...