The Blue City

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Fiction. In the complicated trio of Tomas the fishmonger, Marta the intellectual, and Josef the shady narrator involved in something dark and unsaid, Sean Thomas Dougherty fashions a series of intertwined noir chapters that draw on real and imagined Eastern European history. In THE BLUE CITY, characters weave in and out of mythical cities based on colors that cut across time and space, as they seek to understand the many avenues that inhabit us both outside and within. Part Calvino, part Jabes, this brief experimental novella challenges notions of the genre, as its characters search for meaning and redemption in their own lives, as the past intrudes into the present, and what was done or not done, will destroy them or be forgiven. "In THE BLUE CITY Dougherty explores the multiple cities in which we live, and which live in us, the way they shade into and clash with one another, and the way the shadows they cast both shelter us and oppress us. A meditation on storytelling and the way stories both shape and deform relationships, THE BLUE CITY is an impressive fable"--Brian Evenson.

126 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2008

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.

Reviews

[Holly M Wendt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange and lovely--while there is an engaging plot underpinning the book, it reads very much like a long prose poem (no surprise, given that the author is a poet). It's a book I wanted to read out loud.