Professor Mark Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. In "Days of 1981," he recalls the memory of his first gay lover—a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained / or lethal offered. I wish I'd kept the heart. / Even the emblems of our own embarrassment / become acceptable to us, after a while." My Alexandria, Doty's third collection of poetry, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1993.