The Problem of the Many

by Timothy Donnelly

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696485
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Timothy Donnelly is the author of The 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 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.

Read an Excerpt

Insomnia

As darkness dissolves
the forms of things

they appear to merge
into the one

unbroken substance
they have been

all along, no single
component of which

can be said to exist
by necessity, but with

such continuous
relation to all other

components, it’s as if
nothing can be

lost without change
to everything, nothing

can be lost without
losing everything.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial 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

From the Publisher

★ 07/15/2019

Impressive in its precise articulation and range of insights, Donnelly’s dazzling third collection extends the thematic reach of his 2010 Kingsley Tufts Award–winning The Cloud Corporation. Charting the underbelly of Western capitalism, the speakers in Donnelly’s poems locate the imperialist impulse in humanity’s distant origins. “First living cell, what have you to say for yourself/ now?” asks “Chemical Life,” embodying the battle against entropy while “the universe tends inexorably toward disorder.” In “Fascination,” the speaker considers the historical and geographical journey of sassafras while drinking root beer, until “I hear the fingertips of history// thrum on tabletops in Roanoke and when popcorn bursts as it/ spins in my microwave.” In these long, associative spirals, Alexander the Great, Elizabeth I, and Nebuchadnezzar are invoked as influences on the present moment and as stand-ins for humanity’s misplaced self-importance. In contrast to human monuments, natural phenomena (such as clouds) pose a problem to conceptual borders: “manifold stuff of reality recombining// itself in response to key events free of regard to what humans take/ to be necessary distinctions.” Donnelly’s eye traces satellite images and contortions of fire above a refinery, while using deadpan humor with equal vividness. From gut flora to galaxies, these poems offer glimpses “that waver like air above lit candles,” restoring meaning to the world in the process. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly