10048 by Edward A. Dougherty

What John Hershey did with Hiroshima, Edward A. Dougherty has done for 9-11. 10048 is an elegy for the World Trade Center, the best kind of poetic history: one which is unvarnished, accurate, compassionate, and poignant.  The poet says that no one had a metaphor for the attack on, and collapse of, the towers. “It sounded just like what it was.” Dougherty repeatedly asked, “What changed after 9-11?” The answer is, everything changed.  All of us old enough to remember that day have stories to tell: Who we knew. What we saw.  Where we were.  10048 is the story of a day that began when the zip code, the book’s title, represented a place, and by the end of that day, was no more.  This is the book not only of our times but for all ages.

–Alan Catlin poet, editor of Misfit Magazine

Edward Dougherty is that rare poet who can sees the dream of peace in destruction. In 10048 he reads in the history of the World Trade Center the primal, epoch-forging experience of collective loss, American loss, a fate tempted by commerce and striving. He shows us how Americans “created the end of freefall by inventing elevation,” how mankind is bound by nature to challenge his greatest creations. His finely wrought elegy boomerangs us through the life, death and afterlife of one such spectacular creation, drawing us to its vision as we are drawn to the conflagration of our impossible desires and deeds.

–George Guida, author of Pugilistic and Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review

Edward Dougherty’s 10048 utilizes that most ancient of poetic tools: the human voice, one charged with generosity and compassion, charged with telling a story that needs to be tugged back from myth and conspiracy into history, into poetry: “Each door is a frame / each frame a cut // each cut a hand / each hand a story.”  We need this tender voice, these human poems more than ever right now.

–John Bradley, author of Erotica Atomica