Claire Dougherty - Guilt, Fear, and Superstition

Part daybook, part grimoire, Claire Dougherty’s debut Guilt, Fear, and Superstition is a mystifying blend of daily practice with a poetics on the edge of human thought. These poems witness a supremely lucid daily consciousness, and are equally entranced with weaving through: the art economy, human blood, poet as practitioner, family life, a mysterious pair of missing sandals, and of course the sunny gates of California. Through a series of looping sonnets, sequences, and poems of true sustain, Dougherty offers us a brilliant collection of “Just black and white / Poems without nuance about what is going on / And what I am thinking about each day.”

"Every so often a poet arrives whose tone excites and eludes like a “dream which escapes (you) / the more (you) try to grasp it,” refreshing and expanding your sense of what poetry can accommodate and hope to achieve. Claire Dougherty is one such poet. And when I say “tone,” what I mean is more than that, ultimately—I mean voice, perspective, personality; some complex set of properties I can’t completely pin down or wholly account for, although it imbues each of her poems with something both unmistakable and impossible to resist. It doesn’t feel enough to describe her poems as “uncanny,” although they certainly are, and they aim to awaken all the strangenesses asleep in the familiar that habit and power don’t want us to see. And “confessional” doesn’t scratch the surface either; rather, they are magnetic with intimacy, and draw you into their reality so entirely, you forget it isn’t also yours. That feeling you have you leave the cinema after watching the best kind of movie—that’s what these poems fill you with, that same degree of wonder and gratitude, like when you realize that angels have been communicating to us all along, “wordlessly through strange coincidences or through / other people when you actually listen to them.”

—Timothy Donnelly

"In Claire Dougherty’s Guilt, Fear, and Superstition, we enter a realm of quickened language, spilling over with lush, vibrant imagery and a centripetal force of pure emotion. Many poems in the book play with the history of the confessional poem and find a new way to re-see and re-think the form into something both timeless and of our time. Guilt, Fear, and Superstition is laden with gorgeous gifts of lyrical finesse, including an artist’s “famous blood red and/ electric blue which looks nothing like the sky,” “women/ and green,” “Lobsters, oysters, cherries and pearls,” “Red houses with green roofs,” someone reading “the newspaper as a goose approaches,” and “a giant blue sky in Utah.” The poetry in Dougherty’s book shocks us with its sublime beauty, emerging from the ocean of time. Somewhere the book exclaims “I love poetry so much” and we believe it. Guilt, Fear, and Superstition is the kind of book that makes us love poetry even more than we already do. Guilt, Fear, and Superstition is a book of really important poetry. Guilt, Fear, and Superstition is a book of real poetry.

— Dorothea Lasky

"Can a sonnet change your life? Can a poem heal you? Claire Dougherty’s debut collection, Guilt, Fear, and Superstition, addresses these questions. Her poems behave like up-to-the-minute spiritual / secular remedies or exercises in which everyday tedium can morph into surreal predicaments. Dougherty casts a side eye at affluent hip culture, social networking, and the workplace. She pushes us to lightlycareen with her down her steep slide where scenarios go by like simulacra of real-life narratives. If she could just possess the right mood and skill set, she’ll manage. With a combination of wicked humor and pathos, this stunning collection proves that, yes! a poem can alter and even heal you."

—Molly Bendall