Still life with oysters and lemon

From Mark Doty, one of our finest poets, a delicate and sensual literary essay. Part memoir, part art history, part meditation, this hybrid volume uses the great Dutch still life paintings of the seventeenth century as a departure point for an examination of uestions about our relationships with things, how we invest them with human store, how they hold feeling and hope and history within them.

Mark Doty is author of five books of poems and two memoirs, Heaven's Coast and Firebird. He has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Martha Allrand Prize for Nonfiction. He teaches at the University of Houston.