05/19/2014
A blue-collar, Rust Belt romantic to his generous, enthusiastic core, Dougherty has filled eight prior volumes with character sketches, pool hall odes (he now works in a pool hall), vaunting declarations, outcries, celebrations, protests, and promises, “in the rusting cities in the rusting places where we leaned against the wall, in the smoky haze of bar smoke and breath.” Dougherty’s long Technicolor lines and staunch prose blocks (and the occasional shorter form) cover sex, parenthood, street life and playground basketball, skateboards, shoplifters, and the prison-industrial system; his portraits “Drawn In Blue Light and Broken Glass” include a “chick… who didn’t make the cue ball dance, she made it tango,” “your father working in the mines,/ rising to punch a clock”; they coalesce into a gloriously troubled American of black and white, Puerto Rican and Korean, of “brown children whose English teachers have silenced the Trinity of Spanish, English & Lebanese.” And for all their street energy they are determinedly literary as well: name checking Lorca, Neruda and Bjork, as well as Martin Espada and Patricia Smith, Dougherty (Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line) also accomplishes a brace of sonnets, an abecedary and a canzone whose repeated end-words are “bodega,” “booty” and “hood.” The Erie, Pa. writer wears his heart on both sleeves—he is not for everyone: but readers in search of socially conscious vigor, of street energy and “something to hold onto,” may find that Dougherty is just what they need. (May)
"[Dougherty] wears his heart on both sleeves—he is not for everyone: but readers in search of socially conscious vigor, of street energy and “something to hold onto,” may find that Dougherty is just what they need." —Publishers Weekly
“Dougerty has been a staple of the underground poetry scene for nearly 30 years. He’s come up the hard way—no overnight successes, no long-term university positions—and his poetry is as honest and ALIVE as any you’ll read. When people talk about the poetry scene going soft or the scourge of 'workshopped poems' or, God forbid, the death of poetry—it’s because they haven’t read Dougherty’s work. This New and Selected volume covers his full career-to-date and should wake us all up to the underground sound that’s throbbing like a bass drum in the heart of contemporary poetry. Poetry ain’t dead. It’s working in a pool hall in Erie, Pennsylvania.” —BUSTLE
"There is unflinching realism in his work that the astute reader soon realizes that his poetry and his humanitarianism are among the most worthy American literary descendants of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, whom Dougherty refers to as the father and mother of American poetry.” —Utah Review
"Dougherty celebrates a pivotal (if symbolic) touchstone. For more than two decades Dougherty has maintained a unique place in contemporary poetry by honoring the ghost notes of our everyday life. The breadth of this selected collection charts the development of Dougherty’s career and examines our conflated assumptions of race, class, and the urban experience.... His work, however personal, can also serve as a kind of historical record; the heart inside the heart of urban America. The political realities of our time are evoked on every page, whether or not Dougherty calls them out by name. Rather, it is the canvas backdrop of an extended portrait spanning two decades of indelible poetry." —Pleiades
