Winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize, Sean Thomas Dougherty's collection EXCEPT BY FALLING articulates the struggles of working-people in the predominantly blue collar neighborhoods of his youth, and the Syracuse, NY neighborhood where he currently lives. His poems capture the corners, schoolyards, playgrounds, bodegas, the kid who bounces a basketball from "there to where," men and women who work in factories, and Haitian teenagers harassed by cops. 
Yet also within this book, there is a litany of cultural and political references: Eurydice and the Argentine Amnesty, Eric Dolphy and Pablo Neruda, Miles Davis and Marc Chagall, the Zootsuit riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.--as well as Dougherty's articulation of the struggles against racism that his own interracial upbringing calls him to engage. 
Most of the poems are written in a variety of traditional "closed" forms designed to reflect the reality of economic and social barriers that impede the lives of working people--as if these barriers can be resisted by their appropriation, how they can be changed into a form of singing, a form of song.

Except by Falling

Dougherty, Sean Thomas

Pinyon Press

Poetry. "Yes, these poems glow with what is most tender in Lorca; but they also strut with what is most wiseass in O'Hara; they brood with what is most earnest in Akhmatova. In this book one hears the footsteps of all the teachers and friends and loved ones and strangers that people Sean Thomas Dougherty's mind (the blood's library) and heart (the blood's dancehall); one recognizes them as the footsteps of our own wide-opened, inescapable world"--Terrance Hayes.

Nightshift Belonging To Lorca

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Mammoth Books

Fiction. In the complicated trio of Tomas the fishmonger, Marta the intellectual, and Josef the shady narrator involved in something dark and unsaid, Sean Thomas Dougherty fashions a series of intertwined noir chapters that draw on real and imagined Eastern European history. In THE BLUE CITY, characters weave in and out of mythical cities based on colors that cut across time and space, as they seek to understand the many avenues that inhabit us both outside and within. Part Calvino, part Jabes, this brief experimental novella challenges notions of the genre, as its characters search for meaning and redemption in their own lives, as the past intrudes into the present, and what was done or not done, will destroy them or be forgiven. "In THE BLUE CITY Dougherty explores the multiple cities in which we live, and which live in us, the way they shade into and clash with one another, and the way the shadows they cast both shelter us and oppress us. A meditation on storytelling and the way stories both shape and deform relationships, THE BLUE CITY is an impressive fable"--Brian Evenson.

The Blue City

Marick Press

Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts features cutting edge poetry by T.R. Hummer, Rebecca Seiferle, Jude Nutter, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Doug Anderson, Daniel Nathan Terry, Karen Carissimo, Patricia Clark, Kathryn Winograd, Ann Fisher-Wirth as well as short stories by Pam Houston, Alfred Corn, Christiane Buuck, Carlos Gomez and Jamie Carr.

Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts

Seiferle, Rebecca

Hummer, Tr

Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts

Through the smoke-lit pool halls, back roads, rehab centers, truck stops, and diners of the still industrial world, Sean Thomas Dougherty offers us the stories he has lived and collected of men and women barely working, just getting by, but every morning still going on, even if unsure.
Unsung unbearably blue, even frightening
in how they leave us, our responsibilities
among the debris, these utterances
we cannot hold.
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. He lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches writing workshops.

Scything Grace

Etruscan Press

Poetry. In the spirit of Michael Martone's contributor note essays, Sean Thomas Dougherty has created a book of responses written to his rejection letters. After a furious series of rejections from dozens of literary magazines, Dougherty had enough. He decided to fight back. Sean improvised in real time a series of epistolary public responses on Facebook over a six-month period that began Dear Editor. The edited result is this collection. But this book is less about the literary arts than it is about Dougherty's life, his family, friends, and the world of people struggling to live in the working-class cities and towns along Lake Erie. This book writes back against the world that says shut up, you are less than, you do not matter, you are poor, you are different. You are damaged. These pieces hope to connect across our shared failures. Editing is a tough job. We are all in some ways both submitters and gatekeepers as artists, even if only inside ourselves. In the end we are all failures. We are all witnesses for each other.

All My People Are Elegies: Essays, Prose Poems and Other Epistolary Oddities

Essays & Correspondence

NYQ Books

Fusing street scenes (from Budapest to New York City) with family history (African American and Jewish), Sean Thomas Dougherty uses both traditional and experimental forms to explore issues of identity and family. Deeply rooted in music and performance, Dougherty’s poetry resists easy categorization, revealing the complexity of our lives and times.
 Sean Thomas Dougherty lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the BFA program for creative writing at Penn State Erie. He is a nationally renowned performance poet and author of nine previous poetry collections. He was a finalist for the 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize.

Broken Hallelujahs (American Poets Continuum)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

"These soul-infused, deftly crafted stanzas pulse with the rhythms of a poet who lives his life out loud. Sean Thomas Dougherty has always shunned convention in favor of his fresher landscapes—and this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon."—Patricia SmithSasha Sings the Laundry on the Line is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply felt collection that finds the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be.The author of ten previous poetry collections, Sean Thomas Dougherty teaches poetry at Case Western University and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio.

Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (American Poets Continuum, 125)

For over twenty years Sean Thomas Dougherty has negotiated between modernist and avant-garde writing and more populist traditions that extend back to Walt Whitman. His subject matter ranges from basketball to Bjork, from blue collar workers to Biggie Smalls, from Luciano Pavarotti to women waiting at a diner outside a prison in Upstate New York. Selecting from the best of eight previous collections, this New and Selected reveals the powerful arc and development of Dougherty's writing and establishes him as a voice of dissent for the future. A former Fulbright fellow, Sean Thomas Dougherty works at Gold Crown Billiards in Erie, Pennsylvania.

All You Ask For is Longing: New and Selected Poems: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Continuum)

Parenting & Relationships

Winner of the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize Winner of the 2019 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry
 Sean Thomas Dougherty celebrates the struggles, the dignity, and the joys of working-class life in the Rust Belt. Finding delight in everyday moments―a night at a packed karaoke bar, a father and daughter planting a garden, a biography of LeBron James as a metaphor for Ohio―these poems take pride in the people who survive despite all odds, who keep going without any concern for glory, fighting with wit and grace for justice, for joy, every god damned day.

The Second O of Sorrow (American Poets Continuum Series, 165)

Business & Money

Economics

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Books by Dougherty, Sean Thomas