All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems

For more than 20 years, Sean Thomas Dougherty has negotiated between modernist and avant-garde writing and more populist traditions that extend back to Walt Whitman. His subject matter ranges from basketball to Björk, from blue collar workers to Biggie Smalls, from Luciano Pavarotti to women waiting at a diner outside a prison in Upstate New York. Selecting from the best of eight previous collections, this New and Selected reveals the powerful arc and development of Dougherty’s writing and establishes him as a voice of dissent for the future. We Once Were Stolen Skateboards doing tricks on the steps of city hall, and names written with a stick in wet cement, we stood like children holding bouquets at the Olympic trials before we leapt, we didn’t hesitate to burst, we made ramps on undeveloped land, drank fifths till we dropped at  abandoned construction sites, a few we burned, dropped the match and dashed, petty larceny of news, we took the chance to steal anything mid-sentence, slow p