SOURCE: Hoey, Allen. Review of Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, by Mark Doty. Southern Humanities Review 27, no. 1 (winter 1993): 96-100.

In the following excerpt, Hoey offers praise for Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, stating that Doty manages to create balance between straight narrative and the “stricture of lyric.”

For Mark Doty, in Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, his second full-length collection, desire even at its most carnal, as in a garden where “every alcove / [was] alive with men until after dawn” and the speaker “didn't know whose hands were whose” (“Paradise”), is the way we struggle toward, as he writes in another poem, “the body's paradise”—an approach to divinity. Doty's subjects include a sixteen-year-old runaway living in a residential hotel in New York City, the clientele and performers at a seedy gay nightclub, the world revealed through books and artifacts, and, in the poem from which the title comes, an exhibition...