Poetry. "What would you get if you crossed French postmodern theory with an Appalachian Southern stock(car)? Tim Earley and this book, a book of poetry as dense as kudzu, the prolific half-mad fully strange quite funny alphabetic riffing alive in & enlivening a truly New South. A rich crazy book propelled equally by the engines of love and anger, a restless intelligence honking & screaming & improvising a new hymn of place, rich in the nutrients of an omnivorous vocabulary, pointing the way to stagger, dance, and run through 'another embittered paradise,' asking 'is there a self in the belly of the beast?'"--Hank Lazer.

The Spooking of Mavens

Literature & Fiction

Earley, Tim

Poetry

Cracked Slab Books

Poetry. "The only way these poems could've existed without the glorious mind of Tim Earley is if Gertrude Stein, having found herself suddenly preaching in the deep south, punched Gerard Manley Hopkins in the face while he sang in her choir, and if the rearrangement of bruise and bone, fist to face, her language against his, was delivered to the congregation as a prayer, as a whole town's last goddamn hope, then maybe, maybe the faintest scent of these poems, having stayed on the collar of a small boy's woolen coat a little too long, wafted into the cold, crisp air, traveling from bird to bird, waking up the oldest prisoner with only minutes before his sentence to write Earley's words down. This is how beautiful and impossible. This is how rare. Thank god for Tim Earley and his new, heavenly sack of genius poems."—Sabrina Orah Mark

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery

Horse Less Press

Poetry. '"I took much trouble into myself,' says Tim Earley at the beginning of this audacious and revelatory book. Like an Appalachian Whitman, he consumes everything — work, kinship, sex, love, illness, religion, and violence (both invasion and self–harm) — and '[vomits] out the old weird America.' Earley sings in 'impossible registers,' rivaling fellow white trash iconoclast Axl Rose's famous vocal range. He gives us Dauphins and Goody powder, 'pure spirit' and Spam, moving easily between the ludicrous and the sublime. Every page of this book is scrawled with stupendous feats of language, but LINTHEAD STOMP is no mere verbal flood. It is an elegy for a 'cousin who died in restraints at the mental hospital in Morganton,' a brother so distraught over the death of Dale Earnhardt he loses fifty pounds, a friend going mad in a trailer full of pills and Spanish art. It is a tribute to a people who have been ridiculed, patronized, exploited, and ignored. Terrifying and heartfelt, urgent and absurd, LINTHEAD STOMP is Earley at his most devastating and delightful. A truly transcendent book." —Mark Neely

Linthead Stomp

Poetry. "Tim Earley's crazed, ceremonial ceramic concoction--EPIGRAMS BOTH LUDIC AND REGICIDAL--got me thinking on Keats's illustrious and illustrated urn, all glazed with double-dipping truth and beauty and whatnot. But the Jeroboamian vessel here is awash in a goddam gouache of red-figured language and is smashed to smithereens by the most loquacious of syntactical sledgehammers, a perfected ball-peening into these totemic, shamanistic, sublime and subliminal shards. These proems--let's call them contemporary divining ostracons--banish us to the sensuous land of necessary nonsense, strangers in the land of nod where we nod yes and yes to these epic epigrams, and yes, to these moving moments, generated by this earnest earner, Tim, right on time."--Michael Martone

Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal

Delete Press

ere are mystery and mastery in Tim Earley’s poems. He is able to give into the unfathomable forces that swirl around him: the geology and genealogy, the museum and mystery of the South among them. His poems speak to an immersion in the manifold, a look at the eccentric and odd; their idiosyncratic music envelops us in time, makes a new time. . . in this way he’s able to open up the perplexed interior for us to see. The sight can be unnerving or sad. Or it can be astonishing and gorgeous. His work is exuberant and restless and always wanting to “further.” Bruce Smith

Boondoggle

Main Street Rag