Sean Thomas Dougherty has written a stunningly gritty book that leads the reader through the tenements, streets, and playgrounds of Northern New England and Central New York. Dougherty is the poet of the small city, and in his new collection he offers the reader intimate portraits of the people who spend their days simply trying to survive, of rooming houses where "each room is a heart, barely beating," and teens who spend their nights cruising the boulevards looking for "rolled-down-window waltzes/ of red-light-chance-encounters." He infuses the stories of these lives with a lyric intensity that moves beyond the performance realm.
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Dougherty's brave poems transport us to the fault lines of our lives, where street talk meets pantoum, where Kundera and Lorca meet the world of the holding cell and the chain-link fence. His voice is a poignant one, with the punch and jab of street rhythms moving us toward the eloquence of his message: a reverence for the "precarious balance" the tough beauty of living -- Jan Beatty
I read poetry because it is difficult to be human and awake, difficult to stave off the whelming numbness that is fashionable these days. Good poems remind me that if the human world can ever be made bearable or pleasurable in any meaningful sense our affirming passions must find words, find the sentences fierce and sleep enough to break the deadening weather of the dim-witted convention. Sean Thomas Dougherty's poems come at you with such clear-headed snap and flavor, such carefully triggered punch, that reading them is like encountering the first breezes, storms of a new season. Reading his work is a sweet encouragement to persist, to keep your tilt toward sanity -- Tim Seibles
I read poetry because it is difficult to be human and awake, difficult to stave off the whelming numbness that is fashionable these days. Good poems remind me that if the human world can ever be made bearable or pleasurable in any meaningful sense our affirming passions must find words, find the sentences fierce and sleep enough to break the deadening weather of the dim-witted convention. Sean Thomas Dougherty's poems come at you with such clear-headed snap and flavor, such carefully triggered punch, that reading them is like encountering the first breezes, storms of a new season. Reading his work is a sweet encouragement to persist, to keep your tilt toward sanity -- Tim Seibles
From the Publisher
A founding member of the Drive-By Poets Collective, Sean Thomas Dougherty is one of the nation's most highly regarded performance poets, featured at such venues as The Associated Writing Programs Conference, The Lollapalooza Music Festival and The National Poetry Slam. The author of two previous collections he is the editor of award winning Red Brick Review, and an editor at Syracuse University's Salt Hill Journal. He teaches at Syracuse University and for the Arts In Education Institute of Central, NY.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
New Jersey Urban,
By Cody Todd (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Body's Precarious Balance (Paperback)
When I first read this novel in 1999, I never knew what a young, up-and-coming Generation, X or Y'er could do to wield the power of poetics in his work. Sean-Thomas Dougherty, whom my mentor Lorna Dee Cervantes recommended me to, is an underlooked prize for anyone looking for something different, yet meaningful in contemporary poetry. His words are performance-based tinging upon the conscioussness of street-slang, hip-hop or rap, but maintaining that elloquence of the "classical," literary tradition of form and diction in post-modern poetry. His "personal," experiences are locked in the contradiction of one who remembers things events, people, etc. merely as a dream, yet to the reader there is no gap in finding a sentimental connections between the speaker and his environment. As I know it, this gentleman is nearing the age of thirty, launches the New-Jersey Literary Journal entitled, "The Red Book Review." His writing is colorful, yet painfully "real," fans of Selby jr, Bukowski, Kerouac, as well as Quincy Troupe or just a fellow Hip-Hop fan, should take note. Dougherty provides a wonderful landscape of a youth in his New Jersey, street setting.
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