The Blue City by Sean Thomas Dougherty is a rich lyrical narrative whose rhythms are as natural as breath and whose associative and linear storytelling styles create a remarkable dream world. It is music itself, light, color, thought, emotion, reflection. It is at once prayer, complaint, philosophical musing, memory, history. And yet it is also the story of three intriguing characters: Thomas, the fishmonger, Marta, Thomas’ wife and Josef who “can film anything and not blink.” Blue City weaves its spell through their individual stories and the story of their shifting relationships.

            Dougherty’s Blue City is where the story begins, but the Blue City is not where the story will permanently reside. In fact, the narrative will take us to many cities, quite often depicted against an Eastern European backdrop. But essentially, these cities are states of mind, one’s place in the world at any given point in time. The Blue City is Cathedral-skyed and God-inhabited. It is the City of Ablutions and morning prayers at synagogues. The Black City is the city of night-song, insomnia, a spontaneous, unannounced art. And among other cities of other colors, the Red City is the City of Return.

            Many cities reside within a person at once. When Josef, the narrator, begins to experience the insomnia of “the sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake” (An allusion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children, an allusion that occurs throughout the narrative), he is faced by what happens when the past overtakes the present. The psychic conflict within is portrayed as a person inhabited by many cities:

The past is what can erase the present. Think. Who are the heartbroken but those who cannot enter the present? They wander in the City of Bridges and Broken Roses. You can see them on The Bridge of Memories staring down at the Black Water as if they will jump into the air between. Between is where they remain and live. Living is suspended, like a bridge, the past to one side, the future to the other, the present flowing past like a river one does not enter. What you have become is One of those Histories in all you deal with. Now you yourself have become a City of Black Water, a City of Slow Deaths, a City of a Thousand Held Breaths. No wonder you wander the Bridges, walking each blue dawn over the seine-casters, past the virgin-less school-girls and the begging Gypsy boys. For how long have you lived in the City of Begging Orphans? You who lived in the City of Blind Notions? Welcome home to the City of Regrets. No wonder you can’t sleep. (pp. 50-51)

            After reading such material, it seems inadequate to describe a sorrow-crushed life in any other way.

            The rich lyricism of this work and its exploration of lives we can identify within ourselves - lives that can be seen through the scrim of our shared histories, cries and prayers and hopes for something beyond what is - makes The Blue City a beautiful book in which to dwell. You will not want to leave its pages. We all live within its walls.