The Problem of the Many

The Problem of the Many

If <em>The Cloud Corporation</em> is, as John Ashbery called it, “the poetry of the future, here, today,” then Timothy Donnelly’s third collection, <em>The Problem of the Many</em>, 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.