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.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; Except by Falling, winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize from Mesa State College; and BOA titles Broken Hallelujahs, Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, and All You Ask For is Longing: New and Selected Poems.
His awards include two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry. Known for his electrifying performances, he has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He received an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and lives in Erie, PA where he teaches writing workshops.

DISCOGRAPHY

New Poems

Long Like a River
Dear L, Am I Another Exchanged for Yes
The Blues is a Verb
Dear L, The Choruses We Lost Along the Coast
Poem To Be Put in A Drawer After Telling
The Spanish Poet Tries to Explain
Song for my Father
Poem Written on a Chain-Link Fence
Against Economics
What Singing Left We Wrote Was What Was Sung
Dear L, I Don't Know How Across the Grass Our Daughter Runs
Balancing Life (a ball a blade a)
Most of my Life is Gnawing the Most Remarkable Lies
Our Limping
When the Sirens Shriek
At the Toss of a Coin A Dream Like a Jaguar Walked into Jorge's
Cue
Double It
Jorge's Uncle
Dear You Who Never Returned
More Alone Than Lonlieness
Deserted Parking Lots with Faded Lines
We Once Were Stolen Skateboards
A Weight
What Is Lost Is Never Said
Waiting to be Shot in the Back
Searching for a Shallow Vein
Decateur Chevy
Dear L, Dizzy
Dear L, I Cannot Spell
Anything That Can Be Misread
Dear L,I Am Your Scar
The Voice I Pretend I Am Sometime
Dear L, The Door Shuts the Rain
Everyway Our Lungs Tattered

~
The Mercy of Sleep 1994

Tears for Saint Catherine
Tears of Saint Catherine
The Staircase of the Body
On her Journey to Avignon to Argue the Fate of the Church with the Pope
Like the Wings of White Moths on Moonless Nights
Wounds of Blood and Light

~
Love Song of the Young Couple, The Dumb Job 1994

At Mike's Pub and Grub
Tiny Griefs
Danger Flammable
The Sweeper
I'm Looking for Lorca in your Letters
I Open my Eyes to the Wind at the Corner

~
The Body's Precarious Balance 1997

Beyond the Chain-Link Fence
Poem for Anthony Otherwise Known as Head
Days of 1984
Long Coats with Deep Pockets
Insert Your Name Here
An Iron Spiral
Cocoons
Moon-Grief Utterance
The Coat
Alba on the Second Floor
Clay

~
Except by Falling 2000

Spoken Blind to a Break Beat While Drinking
Untitled at Hong Fats
The Somnambulist Waltz
Hungry
There is Nothing to Offer my Breath
Lamentation
The Body is the Water
Nine Innings to Go

~
The Biography of Broken Things 2003

In the Biography of Broken Things
Prisons
Them
At a Certain Hour. On a Certain Day
Spread Your Wings
In the Rain

~
Nightshift Belonging to Lorca 2004

Invocation
Erotic Poem
Oranges
Fuck Me Like Being Born (after Ruth Schwartz)
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Bus Stop at 12th Street
Rimas Dissolutas
Against Green
Snowglobe
In the Gloaming

~
Broken Hallelujahs 2007

Dear Pistachio
The Sky Inside
All You Ask for is Longing
My Father's Fro in the Mode of Romare Bearden
Oberek for Etheridge Knight
The Day Biggie Smalls Died (AKA Christopher Wallace, March 7, 1997)
Embraceable You
Kowalski: A Historiography
What We Keep
After the Election

~
Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line 2010

Arias
The Opposite of Elegy
Dear Tiara
Our Love as an Origami Crane
Raphael
Shell
Untitled on Someone Else's Anniversary
Duet