Boondoggle. 2005. Main Street Rag. Out-of-print.
Franz Wright: "Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for Tim Earley, precocious practitioner of patience and energy, music and wit, the hauntingly sad and outrageously funny, the aphoristic and the explosive. He seems to me to be striking in his language a marvelous balance between the torrential and a spacious clarity. He brings to mind the master, James Tate, and at the same time--this is strange!--an American and somewhat manic René Char. These poems are fun to read, but they hurt. The guy is going places."
Terrance Hayes: "I've never met this fellow, Tim Earley, but his poems say we've browsed the same libraries, museums, cafeterias, and prisons-- just missing each other each time. Dean Young was there maybe. Bob Kaufman, a gaggle of French poets . . .Edged in something like lucid, melancholic ecstasy the poems say: "I have been walking to greet my last idea of you." I'm stunned by this poet's ubiquitous coming and going, by his way of being both cousin and curiosity. Boondoggle honors the good times we almost had."
Bruce Smith: "There 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."
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