Except by Falling

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize, Sean Thomas Dougherty's collection EXCEPT BY FALLING articulates the struggles of working-people in the predominantly blue collar neighborhoods of his youth, and the Syracuse, NY neighborhood where he currently lives. His poems capture the corners, schoolyards, playgrounds, bodegas, the kid who bounces a basketball from "there to where," men and women who work in factories, and Haitian teenagers harassed by cops.

Yet also within this book, there is a litany of cultural and political references: Eurydice and the Argentine Amnesty, Eric Dolphy and Pablo Neruda, Miles Davis and Marc Chagall, the Zootsuit riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.--as well as Dougherty's articulation of the struggles against racism that his own interracial upbringing calls him to engage.

Most of the poems are written in a variety of traditional "closed" forms designed to reflect the reality of economic and social barriers that impede the lives of working people--as if these barriers can be resisted by their appropriation, how they can be changed into a form of singing, a form of song.

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the 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.