Claire Dougherty

Wednesday, September 16
Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives

Free/RSVP

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The Poetic Research Bureau the book launch of Claire Dougherty's debut Guilt, Fear, and Superstition, on Food presss. Additional readings by Sofia Majstorovic and Mary Clark.

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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.”

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Claire Dougherty’s writing has recently appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, BOMB, and mercury firs, among elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Sonnets From Lent (Copenhagen, 2025), and co-founder and editor of the journal RECLINER. She lives in Pasadena. Guilt, Fear, and Superstition is her first book. 

Sofia Majstorovic is a waitress based in Morongo Valley, CA. Her work has appeared in Cinema Scope, Forever Magazine, Tilted House, and Downtime Magazine, among others. She is the co-founder and editor of RECLINER and holds an MFA inflected by the novel coronavirus from Columbia University. 

Mary Clark lives in Pasadena, CA. She is a poet, law student and a mom.