"A poetry collection unlike many a book, a distinction in this case as I’m talking about originality and something more, a kind of ingenuity. . . . Dougherty’s poems insist there is life outside containment."—Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind
Description
The Dead Tree Garden presents a profoundly evocative poetic landscape in which themes of memory, motherhood, and mortality are intricately interwoven. Lisa M. Dougherty employs a voice that is at once tender and uncompromising, cultivating a body of work rooted in grief and resilience. Each poem functions as a contemplative exploration of the subtle devastations and unexpected beauty embedded within quotidian experience. Her imagery, marked by its tactile immediacy and emotional rawness, offers readers a fragmented yet cohesive mosaic of lived experience—one that is simultaneously intimate and broadly relatable.
About the Author
Lisa M. Dougherty is the author of Small as Hope in the Helicopter Rain and coauthor of The Answer is Not Here. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Alongside we Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, Double Kiss: Stories, Poems, and Essays on the Art of Billiards, and Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. Her poem “Kildeer” was short-listed for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Erie, PA with her husband and their two daughters.
November 2025