Except by Falling

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.