SOURCE: Wilde, Winston. “The Book of Love.” Advocate (16 April 1995): 62-3.

In the following review, Wilde praises Heaven's Coast and contends that Doty's voice and language in the collection are powerful and important pieces of the contemporary gay canon.

As we pass the one-year anniversary of the death of my lover, gay American writer Paul Monette, it was with great resistance that I agreed to read yet another memoir of yet another AIDS casualty. My defense of selected deafness to the horrors of this planet is still shattered by moments of “fresh grief.”

Mark Doty's lyric recollections in his latest book, Heaven's Coast, on the dying of his lover, Wally Roberts, and on Doty's afterlife will undoubtedly be enshrined with the few other literary master relics of the gay American holocaust. Heaven's Coast is not just about the good nurses and the bad doctors, the ineptitude of family and...