Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
All My People Are Elegies: Essays, Prose Poems and Other Epistolary Oddities

All My People Are Elegies: Essays, Prose Poems and Other Epistolary Oddities

Dougherty, Sean Thomas

Paperback

Letters & EssaysBusiness of WritingGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $15.95

ISBN10: 1630450723
ISBN13: 9781630450724
Publisher: NYQ Books
Published: Oct 21 2019
Pages: 116
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.28 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In the spirit of Michael Martone's contributor note essays, Sean Thomas Dougherty has created a book of responses written to his rejection letters. After a furious series of rejections from dozens of literary magazines, Dougherty had enough. He decided to fight back. Sean improvised in real time a series of epistolary public responses on Facebook over a six-month period that began Dear Editor. The edited result is All My People Are Elegies. But this book is less about the literary arts than it is about Dougherty's life, his family, friends, and the world of people struggling to live in the working-class cities and towns along Lake Erie. This book writes back against the world that says shut up, you are less than, you do not matter, you are poor, you are different. You are damaged. Dougherty offers stories of working-class bars, streets, neighborhoods, insights into his work as a medical technician and caregiver for the brain-injured, and essays that touch on disability rights, his years working in a pool hall, and his autistic daughter. This book is full of people real, and some imagined. He offers us a poignant ode to a coworker taken by gun violence, and unflinching lyrical responses to the illness and alcoholism that has scarred his own family. Dougherty writes, Too often in American culture we are taught to accept rejection without retort. Like it's rude or presumptuous to speak back. What does it mean to be rejected? These pieces hope to connect across our shared failures. Editing is a tough job. We are all in some ways both submitters and gatekeepers as artists, even if only inside ourselves. In the end we are all failures. We are all witnesses for each other.

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