This Town’s Full of Losers. A Reading on the Art of Rejection.
with nationally renowned author Sean Thomas Dougherty
On Tuesday November 19th at 6:30 PM, as part of the Poetry Tuesday Series, Calamari’s Squid Row will be full of unapologetic losers. Nationally renowned poet Sean Thomas Dougherty will be performing and leading a discussion on the Art of Rejection in support of his new book of essays and “epistolary oddities” titled All My People Are Elegies.
Afterwards Dougherty will lead an open mic where people are asked to share their own rejection letters, stories, and poems about rejections of all kinds.
All My People Are Elegies will be available for purchase and signing after the reading.
In the fall of 2018, 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 of that performance is All My People Are Elegies published by New York Quarterly Books. 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, "What does it mean to be rejected? These pieces hope to connect across our shared failures. In the end we are all failures. We are all witnesses for each other."
For more information on All My People Are Elegies visit NYQ Books online.
