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Book Cover for: Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, Sean Thomas Dougherty

Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line

Sean Thomas Dougherty

In the spring of 2007 after a series of traumas including a shooting assault that nearly killed his son, Sean Thomas Dougherty left his teaching job and retreated into a small two room flat on the East Side of Erie, PA. For the next two years Dougherty "listened to my neighbors, helped my friend with a heroin habit, fathered a daughter with her, and watched helplessly as another friend went crazy. More than anything I listened. I listened to my walls. I listened to the silence. I listened to my neighbor Sasha, and I wrote as she hung her laundry on the line." Out of his working class neighborhood, and his travels later sponsored by the US State Department in the Balkans, Dougherty takes us inside language itself: in narratives, monologues, invented forms, lists and prose poem collages, he sings for us his street-driven tough-hearted human arias.

Book Details

  • Publisher: BOA Editions
  • Publish Date: Sep 21st, 2010
  • Pages: 92
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.96in - 6.39in - 0.23in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9781934414392
  • Categories: American - GeneralWomen's StudiesRussian & Soviet

About the Author

Sean Thomas Dougherty: Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books, including Broken Hallelujahs (BOA, 2010), Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Except by Falling, winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize from Mesa State College. Known for his electrifying performances, Dougherty has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He was a 2009 Fulbright Scholar in Macedonia. He now teaches at Case Western Reserve University.

More books by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Book Cover for: Death Prefers the Minor Keys, Sean Thomas Dougherty
Book Cover for: The Second O of Sorrow, Sean Thomas Dougherty
Book Cover for: Scything Grace, Sean Thomas Dougherty
Book Cover for: All My People Are Elegies: Essays, Prose Poems and Other Epistolary Oddities, Sean Thomas Dougherty
Book Cover for: Broken Hallelujahs, Sean Thomas Dougherty
Book Cover for: All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems: New and Selected Poems, Sean Thomas Dougherty
Book Cover for: Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, Tr Hummer

Praise for this book


"Sean reconciles a lot of conflicting registers and references in his poems--hip hop and punk with Lorca, working class narratives with language theory, whatever 'defective means' as Williams said will suffice to make the poem live both on and off the page."
-- The Best American Poetry

"When poetry works well, we learn more than we actually read. Such is the case with Sean Thomas Dougherty's Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line..."
-- Coal Hill Review