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.

Praise for Death Prefers the Minor Keys"In the hours between dusk and dawn the lyric voice does not take respite. We go with our weary speaker from room to room as the owls preside over the sleepers and as those who sweep after the living do their daily rounds. In Sean Thomas Dougherty’s deft prose poems, sentence by sentence the speaker keeps vigil, watching over this fragile world. Over hospital intercoms we hear emphatic music urging those within earshot to listen and know that there are songs playing throughout the night. This is an exquisite collection."— Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth“Sean Thomas Dougherty is the great bard of the American working man. His voice is unmistakable and his poems break the heart and heal it in the same poem, often in the same line. Place, work, illness, death, grief, poverty, and social injustice permeate the powerful prose poems in Death Prefers the Minor Keys. In  ‘my eleven-year-old daughter asks for a pill,’ he writes, ‘I’ve worked third shift for so many years. I sleep when the doves are cooing in the rafters. I sleep after the children board the bus. I sometimes can’t sleep for days, because of work and responsibilities. Some of you can’t understand this, some of you know exactly what I mean.’ One of Sean’s great gifts as a poet is the empathy he extends to the broken world and to his reader, so we always know exactly what he means. I go to Dougherty’s poems for consolation; his enormous humanity gives me hope.”— Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House“In the prose poem ‘Magdalene’ Dougherty writes directly to the great saint: ‘Bearer of Unbearable  Griefs. Witness to the Resurrection.’ He then takes on the apostles who denied her full status and ends with ‘who of them could say they know anything of mercy?’ It's a question Death Prefers The Minor Keys presses continuously against the body of the reader. I have never read a book more relentless and fierce and vital in its asking of this question. No easy answer is forthcoming, but no reader can read Death Prefers the Minor Keys without having the full palpable weight of that question pressed into their consciousness.”— Joe Weil, author of The Backwards YearPraise for The Second O of Sorrow "Dougherty has made something beautiful for us that does not erase the pain, but shares it with us, lets us know we are not alone." —The Arkansas International "In the midst of his grief and anxiety, Dougherty puts forward expressions of startling beauty"— The Sunlight Press

Sean Thomas Dougherty’s other books include The Second O of Sorrow (Boa Editions, 2018), All You Ask for is Longing: Poems 1994-2014 (Boa Editions), Scything Grace (2013 Etruscan Press) and Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (2010 BOA Editions) which was a finalist for Binghamton University Milton Kessler’s literary prize for the best book by a poet over 40, and his awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans, two PA Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry and an appearance in Best American Poetry 2014. Known for his dynamic readings, he has performed at hundreds of venues, universities and festivals including the Detroit Art Festival, the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Old Dominion Literary Festival and across Albania and Macedonia where he appeared on national television, sponsored by the US State Department. Sean is a writing mentor with the MFA program in creative writing at Western Connecticut State University. He lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, works as a Med Tech, tours, hustles, and writes poems about stuff that happens in his city between the lake and the highway, and elsewhere, in our wrecked and gloriously ruined and beautiful American lives.