Description

Sean Thomas Dougherty was raised in an interracial family with an African-American step-father, and a mother whose grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Budapest and the Ukraine. Issues of identity and the complexities of history are central in his work. In Broken Hallelujahs, Dougherty uses a variety of experimental and traditional forms including canzone, prose poem, metered, and elliptical poems. These aesthetic devices structure his themes of personal and historical fissure and the reconnection of such fissures. American and African-American musical poems push against a narrative describing Dougherty's journey to Budapest to walk the streets of his great grandmother. As his multiple ancestries are interwoven across time and space, Dougherty's family, the power of memory, and the need to not forget in the face of historical atrocity, provide a safe passageway, to "Sing across time and space the names of our living, and our dead."

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