Sean H Doyle is a punk rock sailor shaman with a message from way down below decks where the guys with horns and hooves go jet skiing on a lake of fire. This Must Be the Place is a ferocious testament to love and loss written with razor blades and backed with blood

Sean H Doyle, This Must Be the Place, Civil Coping Mechanism, 2015.
www.seanhdoyle.com 

I come here after my shift at the record store and sit around at picnic tables outside, scribbling into notebooks while drinking shitty coffee and waiting for my girlfriend, Velvet, to get off work so we can go get high. The crowd here is varied: AA people alongside art people and punks alongside dirty Deadheads and downtown casualties. There are many open mic poetry events, usually outdoors at dusk. One night I decide to read. I go to the mic and drop weapons. I go to the mic and read about Kuwait City and southern Iraq. I go to the mic and read about prostitutes and hashish and drinking homemade wine made out of grape juice in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I go to the mic and curse over and over again. Nobody claps. Nobody moves. I am not asked to read again. –The Willow House “Sean H. Doyle is a punk rock sailor shaman with a message from way down below decks where the guys with horns and hooves go jet skiing on a lake of fire. This Must Be the Place is a ferocious testament to love and loss written with razor blades and backed with blood. An unputdownable debut.” –Jim Ruland “This Must Be the Place is the book of an orphan in the wake of his delirium struggling to make sense of the loss that caused it. Sean H. Doyle is a walker of fire and slayer of ghouls whose numberless prolonged trials have stripped him of human dross and discrimination alike. Absence is a mentor, in his world, anguish a mold, compassion the reward. If after reading Doyle’s story you don’t fancy him caressing the brow of Despair itself, it won’t be because he’s failed to tell it well. It broke me, this book, then it took my hand and kissed me. I am changed, now, and so much the better, too.” –D Foy “If you’re standing in front of the abyss, offered rope, and told you’ll go deep down, be destroyed, put back together again, and returned to sea level, wouldn’t you go? “Of course I go. Why wouldn’t I go?” This Must Be the Place is that descent. Sean H. Doyle holds the ropes and slips you into those dark realms with distinctive power all his own, generosity born of experience, and a voice that will return you home, altered, transformed.”–Wendy C. Ortiz “Reading This Must Be The Place is like getting mugged, and then once the mugger takes your wallet, they push you on the ground. And then once you’re on the ground, they kick you in the stomach, over and over and over again. And then when you think they’ve finally decided to leave you alone, they kick you once more in the teeth. The only difference is that when Sean H. Doyle is mugging you, the experience is cleansing, invigorating, something that tests your heart but also makes it glow, an experience you don’t want to ever stop. Otherwise, they’re basically identical.” –Juliet Escoria “I can do simple math,” Sean H. Doyle writes in This Must Be the Place. And so he adds it up: the homes, the deceased, the knockouts, the wars, the storms. Doyle renders these scenes with a stoicism and brutality paired with a relentless sense of wonder at his world.”–Chelsea Hodson