SELECTED BOOKS

The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, 2022,  winner of the Jacar Press Prize Full Length Poetry Contest. ‘Raw and plainspoken, heartbreaking yet humorous, this book is free of even the slightest hint of poetry-posturing’.

Not All Saints  The Bitter Oleander Press 2020 These strong and beautiful poems are unafraid to open their interiors to explore secret depths of emotion  and reach into the darkest recesses of grief, love or the musings of a stillborn child.

All My People Are Elegies NY Quarterly Books 2019 In this series of wise and wise-ass psalms, Sean Thomas Dougherty refuses to play the game of quiet acquiescence. Instead, he sings of closed factories and Walmart shoppers, of shift work and daytime drinking and the bitter winds of Lake Erie.

The Second O of Sorrow Boa Editions, Ltd 2018.  Finding delight in everyday moments—a night at a packed karaoke bar, a father and daughter planting a garden, a biography of LeBron James as a metaphor for Ohio—these poems take pride in the people who survive despite all odds. 

Alongside We Travel is s the first literary anthology to gather over two dozen poets from Canada, the United States, the UK and Israel whose lives are intertwined or affected by the autism spectrum. 

The Answer Is Not Here reads as a type of call-and-response, with poignant and passionate poems by Lisa and Sean Thomas Dougherty.  Published in April, 2019 by NightBallet Press, these poems whisper, rather than shout, begging you to lean in and listen more closely to sweet words sharing secret truths.

All You Ask For Is Longing New and Selected, Boa Editions, Ltd 2014. This (collection) reveals the powerful arc and development of Dougherty’s writing and establishes him as a voice of dissent for the future.

Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line Boa Editions, Ltd 2010.  powerful, grief-driven, deeply-felt collection.

Broken Hallelujahs Poems  Boa Editions, Ltd 2007. A variety of experimental and  traditional forms explore issues of identity and the complexities of history.

Scything Grace  Etruscan Press 2013. Stories from the smoke lit pool Scything Gracehalls, back roads, rehab centers, truck-stops and diners of the still industrial lands

The Blue City Marick Press-Wayne State University Press 2008. A series of intertwined noir chapters draw on real and imagined Eastern European history in this experimental novella

Nightshift Belonging to Lorca Mammoth Books 2004.  Often formal and experimental in the same breath, an evocation of a blue collar world  in exquisite urban metaphors.