Raw and plainspoken, heartbreaking yet humorous, this book is free of even the slightest hint of poetry-posturing. ‘I learned how to take care / of people from taking care of you I thought until I realized / it was you taking care of me,’ reads one of many poems that will not turn away—from a wife struggling with illness and addiction; from two daughters, one of whom has autism; from strangers cared for as part of a night-shift job. There are time clocks to be punched and his wife’s feeding tube to tend, and between it all, there are wrecked crews serving up luscious ribs, and in the epic title poem, there are ghosts, everywhere ghosts, for ‘to love the dead, / we must listen / for the dead.’ Running throughout is also a current of social justice, a speaking up for working folks of every race and class fueled by the type of attention that is another name for love. And Dougherty, despite all the acknowledged sorrow, refuses despair: ‘Praise the worn boots of every father. … Praise the barbed wire & the crow. Praise the blue light on the snow….Praise the music of our hands.’ Praise then this book where even pain arrives polished to a shine, praise Sean Thomas Dougherty’s The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things.” —Jessica Jacobs & Nickole Brown
Author
In addition to Scything Grace (Etruscan Press, 2013), Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of thirteen books across genres, including the forthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing: Poems 1994 – 2014 (BOA Editions, 2014) Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA Editions, 2010), which was a finalist for Binghamton University Milton Kessler’s literary prize for the best book by a poet over 40, the prose-poem-novel The Blue City (2008 Marick Press/Wayne State University), and Broken Hallelujahs (BOA Editions, 2007). He is the recipient of two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. His work has been read on PBS radio in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester and Cleveland. Known for his electrifying performances he has performed at hundreds of venues, universities and festivals across North America and Europe including the Lollapalooza Music Festival, the Detroit Art Festival, the South Carolina Literary Festival, the Old Dominion University Literary Festival, Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Maine, Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY Binghamton, the University of California Santa Cruz, the Rochester Symphony Orchestra, the Erie Jazz Festival, the London (UK) Poetry Cafe and the BardFest Series in Budapest Hungary, and across Albania and Macedonia where he was translated and published and appeared on national television, sponsored by the US State Department. He currently lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, with his family, where he works in a pool hall and writes his poems.
