Friday, September 18, 2026 at 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Stories Books & Cafe, Los Angeles
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.” Claire Dougherty’s chapbook Sonnets From Lent was published by Copenhagen in 2025. Her debut poetry collection, Guilt, Fear, and Superstition will be published by Food, and The Claire Bitch Project, a series of booklets, will be published by Theaphora. She edits RECLINER. She is from Stockton, California and is based in Los Angeles. joined by readers Molly Bendall and Corina Copp