The Problem of the Many

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The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work - the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do' - Nick Laird If Timothy Donnelly's second collection The Cloud Corporation was, as John Ashbery called it, 'the poetry of the future, here, today,' then Donnelly's third collection, The Problem of the Many, is the poetry of the future. In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit of human experience, Donnelly confronts - from a contemporary vantage point - the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great.

Reviews

The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work - the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do -- Nick Laird
Omnivorous, fast-forward, bull-in-a-china-shop poems that deliver more beauty per minute than can comfortably be withstood. If Whitman had had a young kid and a Brooklyn apartment, too many bills, and a stack of takeout menus in the top drawer of his Ikea desk, he would have written these poems. * New Yorker *
Donnelly is a poet everyone should read. * Guardian *
Dramatic tension, humor, lyrical profundity. This is an utterly ingenious and proudly inclusive voice . . .a sensibility so urgent we find ourselves momentarily re-inventing the term Poet. -- Carol Muske-Dukes * Huffington Post *
A Stevens of the Anthropocene -- Douglas Crase * Artforum *

Author Bio

Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many; The Cloud Corporation, which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. He is a recipient of The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.