Sean Thomas Dougherty
Portrait of Townes Van Zant as a Murder
of crows, black suited ministers
on the telephone wire,
his guitar strings,
cawing for the coroner
to come as he picked
slow as a dirt road
leading to a rooming house
where someone fingered
a bullet into a revolver,
to shoot his best friend
in bed with his lover,
he sang like the hollow
chamber rings—
Sean Thomas Dougherty was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn, Ohio, and New Hampshire. Dorianne Laux has called him "the gypsy punk heart of American poetry." Dougherty is the author of 13 books, including The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018), All You Ask for is Longing: Poems 1994-2014 (BOA Editions, 2014), Scything Grace (Etruscan Press, 2013), and Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA Editions, 2010), which was a finalist for Binghamton University's Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and his work appeared in Best American Poetry 2014.