Linthead Stomp. Horse Less Press. 2016.
Available at Small Press Distribution
"A viscous larynx, dipped in honey and snake shed, singing, images elucidated by the poverty-objects they juxtapose, a smutty sainthood magical revival tent Psalm: Linthead Stomp sends out lines (but I wanted to write vines) that can hardly contain their surging, vibratory syntactical collisions; here is a language that offers all the innards and the heaving, too. Linthead Stomp is a mercy, and not for the faint of heart. Tim Earley is a poet of the American South that I have been waiting to read my entire life."--Selah Saterstrom, author of Slab and The Meat and Spirit Plan
"Tim Earley is a rascal. And a Roscoe. He levitates beside the great American luminaries. His poetry is fire. And built of the water-giving stone. If folks are not reading Earley centuries from now then they will be a people without eyes. And hearts. For those of you who have been with Earley all along, you will recognize in this collection a culmination. Prophet Earley has always been about bringing rarefied intellect into the gristly grrr of the body. This book takes that intent to epic peaks. New to the Earley dawn and midnight song? I offer your tomorrows to you: you will tousle and dogear this; you will damage it via your love for it; you will clutch it to your ribs and nose; you will stand far too close to a friend; you will lend this Earley; and in lending this; press hard; leave marks. The greats do what? Sear and save. It's time for Tim Earley to appear in the OED: you are wounded where you heal and healed where you are wounded Amen amen AMEN."--Abraham Smith, author of Hank and Ashagalomancy
“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, author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb
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