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Death Prefers the Minor Keys
In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood. In Death Prefers the Minor Keys , Dougherty offers the reader collaged prose poems, stories and essays full of dreams, metaphors, aphorisms, parables and narratives of his work as a caregiver. Moving portraits of Dougherty’s residents, a series of letters to Death, invocations of Jewish ancestry through the photography of Roman Vishniac, imaginary treatments for brain injuries, and half translated short stories of lives both real and imagined populate this collection. Through these, Dougherty engages issues of labor, the ontology of disability, and the mysticism of life.
Death Prefers the Minor Keys is most of all a kind of love letter to Dougherty’s wife, and her courage and complicity in the face of long-term illness and addiction. Ultimately, we see how the antidote to despair can reside in daily acts of caring for other human beings.
Death Prefers the Minor Keys is most of all a kind of love letter to Dougherty’s wife, and her courage and complicity in the face of long-term illness and addiction. Ultimately, we see how the antidote to despair can reside in daily acts of caring for other human beings.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published September 26, 2023
5 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Sean Thomas Dougherty
37 books36 followersIn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 29, 2025
I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this… the prose is beautiful and it’s written with soul. I think I was expecting more connection between the poems that was related to music, but the relation to working on a memory care facility was beautiful, especially after reading Demon Copperhead.
August 21, 2023
This poetry unspools from these pages the way that the fire is the light of the sun unwinding itself from burning wood. Sean Thomas Dougherty looks outward, at his life, his family, his relationships, his job and the people he works with, and in doing so, looks deeply into himself. This book of poems is a memoir, and a confession, and an exclamation of presence and persistence; profound gratitude and sorrow. I read this book today on a moving train to the shore of the ocean, where wave after wave reached a shore waves have reached for eons. I was thankful for the company of this book in that Far Rockaway of my heart, to remind me that poetry should be useful; that a poem can also belong to me, and make me feel I belong. Highly recommended.
Biscuits
Sometimes when I look at the sky I see the clouds become figures seated at a big table. Look, my mother-in-law says, those clouds look like the Last Supper. But it is more like the last brunch, on any Sunday not Mother’s Day, at the Polish Falcons social club, and all the Bushas gossiping about so and so’s cousin and so and so just died, and did you hear her granddaughter married a doctor, or so and so’s son is out of rehab etc. Those women who worked in machine shops for decades, side by side, like my mother-in-law who worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, with a foulmouthed foreman who tormented her, until my mother-in-law just took the buy-out and retired at 62, spit at the feet of the old bitch on her last day, in front of the molding machine she gave forty years—retired to let her bitterness ease with each passing win at Bingo. Now she laughs easy, goes out with her girlfriends, reads her romance novels and every Stephen King, does no housework— “Remember I worked forty years in a shop. I’ve done my time.” Loses days due to her migraines, her scoliosis, her slipped disk, offers up her inappropriate jokes learned on the shop floor, those tough women, with their fulcrums and their wrenches. She never learned to drive, her old shop mate picks her up and off they go to the social clubs, to buy the pull tabs and split the winnings, and the losses, sneak a Vodka before she comes home, and half listen uh huh and um hum to her husband drone on and on about his model trains, or how somebody visited the neighbors this afternoon. Today I watch her out in the garden. She doesn’t really like to plant or dig but I see her look up a lot—what is she staring at? Oh the clouds, that big table of Bushas, daughters of immigrants, up there, blowing on the big wind over the big lake, back to the motherland, and the great fields of wheat, clouds you know—the off-white billowy kind she tells me, “look like a cooking sheet of just baked butter milk biscuits.”
Biscuits
Sometimes when I look at the sky I see the clouds become figures seated at a big table. Look, my mother-in-law says, those clouds look like the Last Supper. But it is more like the last brunch, on any Sunday not Mother’s Day, at the Polish Falcons social club, and all the Bushas gossiping about so and so’s cousin and so and so just died, and did you hear her granddaughter married a doctor, or so and so’s son is out of rehab etc. Those women who worked in machine shops for decades, side by side, like my mother-in-law who worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, with a foulmouthed foreman who tormented her, until my mother-in-law just took the buy-out and retired at 62, spit at the feet of the old bitch on her last day, in front of the molding machine she gave forty years—retired to let her bitterness ease with each passing win at Bingo. Now she laughs easy, goes out with her girlfriends, reads her romance novels and every Stephen King, does no housework— “Remember I worked forty years in a shop. I’ve done my time.” Loses days due to her migraines, her scoliosis, her slipped disk, offers up her inappropriate jokes learned on the shop floor, those tough women, with their fulcrums and their wrenches. She never learned to drive, her old shop mate picks her up and off they go to the social clubs, to buy the pull tabs and split the winnings, and the losses, sneak a Vodka before she comes home, and half listen uh huh and um hum to her husband drone on and on about his model trains, or how somebody visited the neighbors this afternoon. Today I watch her out in the garden. She doesn’t really like to plant or dig but I see her look up a lot—what is she staring at? Oh the clouds, that big table of Bushas, daughters of immigrants, up there, blowing on the big wind over the big lake, back to the motherland, and the great fields of wheat, clouds you know—the off-white billowy kind she tells me, “look like a cooking sheet of just baked butter milk biscuits.”
January 24, 2024
Extraordinary. A poet’s mind on full, glorious display - music and nature and love and addiction and the struggle this world demands of us. Every sentence is exquisitely rendered and yet somehow the whole is still greater than the sum of its parts.
October 9, 2023
Time to write my review for Paterson!!!!!
February 10, 2024
3 stars rounded up not bad at all but wasn’t really my vibe even though I love sad things — I think I would’ve liked more variety on style and form maybe?
June 15, 2024
Oh wow.
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July 27, 2024Dnf @ 20%. I’d be interested in revisiting it in the future but right now the style wasn’t for me
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews