“Audacious of whimsy, ferocious of style. . . . A strutting, dazzling, exhilarating body of work. . . . Donnelly is unquestionably the real deal, shifting registers between the colloquial and the vatic. . . . Deciphering his inventive, intricate palimpsests may take time, but it’s worth the effort. Donnelly’s exuberant rhymes and enjambed rhythms immediately draw a reader in.” –J.Y. Yeh, The Village Voice
‘donnelly, in his inimitably witty, linguistically vigorous style, considers what makes us us, what animates us, moves us, and turns us on. . . . Donnelly’s poetry, then, explores the process of renegotiating the terms of his desire – whereby the act of owning desire is its own form of fulfillment, liberating where the desire simply to own enslaves.” –Ruth Tobias, The Boston Phoenix
“Filled with dreams both romantic and funny. . . . [Donnelly’s] self-deprecating surrealism is vivid and often touching.” –Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun
“The Brooklyn poet has a knack for buried aphorisms . . . and Byronic satire
.” –Entertainment Weekly
“In the spirit of Keats and Shelley and other Romantics, [Donnelly’s] language challenges the very confines of language, daring us to expand our minds by expanding our means of expression. Donnelly’s poems are playful, dynamic, cryptic. A poem such as “Pansies Under Monkhood: A Folly” transforms language into song; the force of sound and rhythm overtakes the logic of grammar and narrative.” –Hillel Italie, Associated Press
“Timothy Donnelly’s book is wide-awake and aims to awaken. Its project–”what are the traits that delineate the human?” –is wondrously traditional, ambitious, and daunting; its formal intelligence and fertility seemingly endless. It joys in language, thrills in the devices of poetic thought, aims far, is honest, is structurally hard-won, is musically brilliant and articulate. It is that rare thing in poetry–a passionate meditation, wild ride, fun read, and a wrenching, sometimes even scary, document regarding who we were and are.” –Jorie Graham
‘since when is a first book this exuberant, this bountiful, this intelligent, this fanciful, this strange? As Donnelly writes: All the world is here. And moreover, this happens to be true. In the vast taxonomy of poetry, Timothy Donnelly is a herd of one.” –Lucie Brock-Broido
“The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence. In Donnelly’s poetry we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity. This book is an accomplishment true to the powers of poetry and also to our need.” –Allen Grossman
Grove Press
