Death Prefers the Minor Keys

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781960145062
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Series:	American Poets Continuum Series , #202
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	482,938
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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 UniversityMilton 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.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/18/2023

In Dougherty’s existential 20th collection (following The Second of Sorrow), he scrutinizes in prose poems the challenges of caregiving, the fleeting nature of life, and the profound moments that shape humanity: “I am old as any levee. The older I get the more I am enamored with the rain, the river, floods.” Reflecting on the contrast between rural dreams and suburban realities, he touches on themes of longing, loss, and transience: “I’d love to have been a farmer with a hundred acres.... The world turns and turns again.” At the heart of the collection, poems like “Written on the Back of Medical Forms” testify to the complexities of caregiving and its emotional toll: “What I have to tell you here has more to do with being human than with spirit.” Dougherty sings of the vast fields of sunflowers in North Dakota and the subtle beauty of tiger-striped butterflies, capturing the essence of life’s ephemerality. The volume is punctuated by moments of raw emotion, as seen in the poignant reflections on aging, the weight of memories, and the ever-present desire for connection. Readers are invited to contemplate the beauty and complexity of life, and urged to find meaning in both the extraordinary and the everyday. Dougherty’s vision is dynamic and brilliant. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

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 Year

Praise 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

From the Publisher