The Problem of the Many

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Winner of the Big Other Award for Poetry and finalist for the Believer Book Award.

• If The Cloud Corporation is, as John Ashbery called it, the poetry of the future, here, today, then Timothy Donnellys third collection, The Problem of the Many, is the poetry of the future yet further pressed to the end of history. In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confrontsfrom a contemporary vantage pointthe 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

Donnelly is a poet everyone should read.--David Wheatley, The Guardian

If Whitman had had a young kid and a Brooklyn apartment, too many bills, and stack of takeout menus in the top drawer of his Ikea desk, he would have written these poems.--Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

The poetry of the future, here, today.--John Ashbery, The London Times

Dramatic tension, humor, lyrical profundity. This is an utterly ingenious and proudly inclusive voice, incorporating clouds--you cannot turn away from it.--Carol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post

Timothy Donnelly meditates on the very terms that make meditation possible--terms such as 'knowledge, ' 'mystery, ' 'particular, ' 'mind, ' and 'will' . . . and he makes the tough time we have pinning those terms down into one of his typical subjects.--Steph Burt, Coldfront

A talented writer . . . an astonishing technician.--David Orr, Poetry

Author Bio

Timothy Donnellyis the author ofThe Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019); The Cloud Corporation(Wave, 2010; Picador, 2011), which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit(Grove, 2003). He is a recipient ofThe Paris Reviews Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of Americas Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Heis Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia Universitys School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.