SOURCE: Brouwer, Joel. “Desire's Power.” Progressive 62, no. 10 (October 1998): 43-4.

In the following review, Brouwer addresses Doty's focus on moving forward after the loss of partner Wally Roberts in Sweet Machine, lauding Doty's emphasis on living a life no longer defined by AIDS.

Sweet Machine is Mark Doty's fifth book of poems, and his first since he published his powerful memoir Heaven's Coast (1996). That book told the story of Doty's relationship with his longtime partner Wally Roberts, who died of AIDS in 1994. Doty's two previous books of poems, My Alexandria (1993) and Atlantis (1995), were dedicated to Wally. In them, Doty chronicled his personal losses to the AIDS epidemic through poems that were brutally direct in their descriptions and gorgeous in their language.

Sweet Machine announces its difference from its predecessors on the dedication page. There is no “for Wally” here, and the book's epigraph, from Hart Crane's poem “Reply,” is...