Mark Doty‘s five books of poetry include My Alexandria, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Atlantis; and Sweet Machine. Mr. Doty said he wrote Heaven’s Coast, a memoir about his life with his partner who died of AIDS, when he realized “it would have felt in some way dishonest to the gravity and intensity of this time of grief to attempt to order it, to shape it in that very controlled way that poems are shaped. Potentially, it was an infinite book.”