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Timothy Donnellyis the author ofThe Problem of the Many(Wave Books, 2019),The Cloud Corporation(Wave Books, 2010), which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, andTwenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit(Grove, 2003). His chapbookHymn to Lifewas published by Factory Hollow Press. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O'Brien he is the co-author ofThree Poetspublished by Minus A Press in 2012. He is a recipient ofThe 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.
These poems are firmly lyric, eschewing narrative. With each poem undertaking a formal constraint of twenty lines across five stanzas, I found myself delighted to linger and trace Donnelly’s twisting syntaxes. Mike Good, Colorado Review As twenty years ago Twenty-Seven Props seemed almost the archetype of a brilliant young poet’s debut book, a dazzling surface that kept its secrets closely guarded, so Chariot seems the work of a mature one, with its subtler music, deeper resonances, and—without being confessional, in the familiar sense—a deeper transparency, a greater openness. Paul Scott Stanfield, Hong Kong Review of Books If you don’t associate twenty-first-century poetry with joyrides, try hopping on Timothy Donnelly’s trains of thought. They run on unpredictable tracks, given to unpunctuated accelerations, slapstick Freudian slips, shortcuts through slang, throwbacks into archaism, and frequent detours through English’s baggiest, least redeemable registers—followed, just as frequently, by conclusions of epigrammatic crispness. Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation Chariot pursues the future while prying into the past, all with Donnelly’s signature wit and variousness. New England Review Donnelly appears as the almost-unwilling captain of the ship of absurdity which all sail upon, and that poetry attempts to clarify. These layered poems are full of worthy questions. Publishers Weekly
