Chariot, a fourth collection of poetry from Writing Professor Timothy Donnelly, is coming this spring from Wave Books.
Calling the collection “a litany of 20-lined poems that wonder at life, its meaning, and its absurdity,” Publishers Weekly praises Donnelly’s work, saying, “[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.”
In “This Is the Assemblage,” the final poem from the collection which also appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Bennington Review, Donnelly concludes, “So if you feel as if / a spell is cast on you, or you can’t quite account for yourself, remember / we’ll always be here at the bottom of it, over. All we have is life.”
“For whatever reason, [this poem is] one of my favorite things I’ve yet to write,” Donnelly said via Instagram. “Sometimes I think of it as the voice of the book itself saying/not saying goodbye to me as it heads off into the distance/goes nowhere, but that seems to me more than a little too self-serious for comfort. Mostly it’s just a poem, lying flat on the page, asking me to remember it. And I do.”
Chariot will be released on May 2, 2023 and is available for preorder here.
Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book of poetry is Chariot (Wave Books, 2023). His other collections include Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebensezeit (Grove, 2003), The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019) winner of the inaugural Big Other Award in Poetry. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O’Brien, he is coauthor of Three Poets (Minus A Press, 2012) and his chapbook Hymn to Life was published in 2014 by Factory Hollow Press. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Bennington Review, Fence, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere, as well as in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Donnelly is a recipient of a Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award and a Faculty Mentoring Award, as well as of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Connors Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and New York State’s Writers Institute. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
