In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood.
Ultimately, we see how the antidote to despair can reside in daily acts of caring for other human beings..
Death Prefers the Minor Keys is most of all a kind of love letter to Dougherty\'s wife, and her courage and complicity in the face of long-term illness and addiction.
Through these, Dougherty engages issues of labor, the ontology of disability, and the mysticism of life.
Moving portraits of Dougherty\'s residents, a series of letters to Death, invocations of Jewish ancestry through the photography of Roman Vishniac, imaginary treatments for brain injuries, and half translated short stories of lives both real and imagined populate this collection.
In Death Prefers the Minor Keys , Dougherty offers the reader collaged prose poems, stories and essays full of dreams, metaphors, aphorisms, parables and narratives of his work as a caregiver.
In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood
