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Winner of the Big Other Book 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 Donnelly’s 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 confronts—from a contemporary vantage—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and Alexander the Great.
"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
CONTENTS
1.
The Stars Down to Earth
Prometheus
Stunt
All Through the War
The Endless
Apologies from the Ground Up
Unlimited Soup and Salad
Diet Mountain Dew
Solvitur Ambulando
Fascination
Malamute
Gifted
The Problem of the Many
2.
Arrows from the Sun
Job
By Night with Torch and Spear
Wasted
Shame
Nebuchadnezzar
A Habitation of Jackals, a Court for Ostriches
Chemical Life
The Radiance of a Thousand Suns
All the Shrimp I Can Eat
Golden
Lunch in a Town Named After a Company Slowly Poisoning Its Residents After Callimachus
3.
The Earth Itself
Happiness
Hymn to Edmund Albius
Escape into Time
Traveler
Jonah
The Death of Print Culture
The Death of the Author
The Death of Truth
November Paraphrase
NyQuil
Leviathan
Mutual Life
4.
Lycopodium Obscurum
Lapis Lazuli
Levitation
Some Comforts at the Expense of Others Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake
Poem on a Stair
Poem Written with a Pinecone in My Hand Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
The Lighthouse of Alexandria
Roof
Burning Lichen from a Bronze Age Megalith Insomnia
Hymn to Life