Tell Me About Heaven by Grace Dougherty Review by Peter Dyer

Tell Me About Heaven by Grace Dougherty

Review by Peter Dyer

Publisher: pois é

Publication Date: 15 November 2022

64 Pages

Limited edition 

The poems in Grace Dougherty’s debut collection Tell Me About Heaven are like several mini-apocalypses: as her internal world falls apart, everything around her seems to be as well. In these pages, someone jumps out the window of an apartment in New York, a dead horse is found on the side of a desert highway, and emergency contacts are nowhere to be found. As a collection, Tell Me About Heaven crafts a remarkably unsentimental portrait of what happens when everything goes wrong, and the simultaneous sadness and relief one feels when realizing that the only person they have to rely on is themselves. 

In my experience, while walking or driving in the desert, ideas arrive with a sort of uninterrupted tranquility, causing a sort of clear-headedness that I never feel in the city. Though Grace Dougherty traverses across many locations throughout this collection, she always seems to return to California and its desert roads, beaches, and bedrooms where the sun streams in. Sometimes this sun-lit imagery is sensual, inviting, like when she’s biting into a pomegranate seed beside the person she loves. Other times, the heat in Tell Me About Heaven creates a space for intense, sometimes painful reflection. 

There’s a striking line in the first poem of the collection—and my personal favorite—“106 degrees in Palmdale,” wherein Dougherty writes at the very end of the poem, “I want to know California like this.” The poem is pure desert hauntology; she depicts how someone has flown out of their car and onto the freeway, and she finds herself at a junkyard to use the bathroom where men crowd around clutching perspiring Monster energy drinks.

After attending college in New York, Dougherty moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. She probably found herself drawn to the strange, smoggy city due to the Los Angeles fantasy of those on the outside. In poems like “106 degrees in Palmdale” and “I Thought California Could Save Me,” Dougherty reveals what living in Los Angeles really felt like after the Eve Babitz and Lana Del Rey-fueled California dreaming started to fade. 

The popular saying “wherever you go, there you are” stayed in my mind while reading Tell Me About Heaven, and I found myself relating to Dougherty’s journey of attempting to find herself in all the places she settles down in. In this collection, a clamorous New York street is no less disconcerting than a quiet desert road, and it’s marvelously resonant to watch her come to terms with the fact that no place, or person for that matter, will actually save her.

Though California is clearly a muse in this collection, Dougherty doesn’t always write about it with the same fawning adoration as other artists inspired by the weirdness of the state. Though it’s where she lives right now, she seems to find comfort in the fact that she could leave at any time. She dreams of bathing in the California sun, enjoying an 80 degree day in January, while New York remains lodged in the back of her mind. She doesn’t seem completely sure if California has saved her or not, but I get the sense that Los Angeles has seen her many changing selves; through leaving acting behind to pursue writing, falling in love after rocky relationships, and grappling with a confused idea of what it means to feel at home. 

Dougherty’s greatest gift as a poet is her eye for movement, her ability to evoke a sense of urgency in the reader through these quietly furious poems. In the acknowledgements, Dougherty thanks a handful of artists who inspired her, one of whom is the up-and-coming musician Ethel Cain. Cain’s star-making album Preacher’s Daughter combines hazy retelling and alarming forthrightness to tell a story about a character, also named Ethel Cain, who runs away from home only to reach a gruesome and murderous end. Though Grace Dougherty doesn’t reach that same fate at the end of Tell Me About Heaven, the lyrical nature of these poems buzz along, entrapped in overthinking and heartbreak, before reaching a satisfying, cathartic conclusion. Ethel Cain, along with other writers, artists, and musicians including Tracy Emin, Richard Siken, and Frank O’Hara, have a presence that is deeply felt throughout this collection. Dougherty clearly wears her influences on her sleeve, and it’s a joy to see the ways in which their work plays a role in her own art. 

Like Cain, and some of her literary contemporaries Anna Dorn and Madeline Cash, Dougherty writes with an absolute lack of self-seriousness, something that can so often plague poetry collections. Though the collection is complete with meticulous detail and care, none of the lines ever feel too analytical and stiff. It’s a delight when her sense of humor makes its way into these poems, such as in “Pulse” when she writes, “Whoever said having a crush is like jail / literally has a PhD.” While many contemporary poets seek to create poems that are akin to Twitter (something that doesn’t always work), Dougherty tastefully utilizes the shared humor of her particular milieu when writing this work, adding moments of glimmer to the stories of heartbreak and uncertainty she shares through these poems. 

Tell Me About Heaven announces the arrival of an excited, curious new voice in the contemporary literary scene, with an urgency that only the best artists possess. Though her future still seems uncertain by the end of the collection, it’s beautiful to watch Dougherty find external and internal homes in each of these poems, writing her way toward a future that feels less opaque. 

Grace Dougherty is a poet and the author of Tell Me About Heaven. Her work has appeared in Forever Magazine, shitwonder, The Quarterless Review, and elsewhere. She is from Baltimore and currently resides in Los Angeles, California. 

Peter Dyer is a writer and critic who also works in publishing. Currently based in New York, his work has been featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Full Stop, among others.

31 May 2023