The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Available on Kindle.

“Raw and plainspoken, heartbreaking yet humorous, this book is free of even the slightest hint of poetry-posturing. ‘I learned how to take care / of people from taking care of you I thought until I realized / it was you taking care of me,’ reads one of many poems that will not turn away—from a wife struggling with illness and addiction; from two daughters, one of whom has autism; from strangers cared for as part of a night-shift job. There are time clocks to be punched and his wife’s feeding tube to tend, and between it all, there are wrecked crews serving up luscious ribs, and in the epic title poem, there are ghosts, everywhere ghosts, for ‘to love the dead, / we must listen / for the dead.’ Running throughout is also a current of social justice, a speaking up for working folks of every race and class fueled by the type of attention that is another name for love. And Dougherty, despite all the acknowledged sorrow, refuses despair: ‘Praise the worn boots of every father. … Praise the barbed wire & the crow. Praise the blue light on the snow….Praise the music of our hands.’ Praise then this book where even pain arrives polished to a shine, praise Sean Thomas Dougherty’s The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things.”

Jessica Jacobs & Nickole Brown

ISBN: 978-0-9845740-3-2