Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. 2014. Horse Less Press.
Juliana Spahr: “Tim Earley writes the regional lit that an Appalachia that has been screwed over once by industrialization and then again by deindustrialization deserves. It is angry, dirty, and drunk. Don’t let the John Clare title confuse you. Earley is our hillbilly Rimbaud.”
Jason Koo, judge of the 2015 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award: "Part Henry Miller, part Rimbaud, part Whitman, part Joyce, all swirled into the “poor, rude clown” of mad John Clare resurrected and rampaging through the “post-natal slime” of the American South, Tim Earley reinvents or damn near obliterates the prose poem in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, a book of “abundant strangeness” and originality, a teeming cesspool of language like a “disease that overspills.” Every sentence in this book is alive and creepy-crawly with creation, belying the book’s title, because there is nothing “descriptive,” but detonating, about what these poems do to the language and the landscape. This book could only be “described” as “like when order is a disrober is a disorder is an ordinance which evades and invades itself, the mouth somewhere else always an anus.” What a terrifying, exhilarating ride, with death riding shotgun, that asks, “Are not our cesspools shared … are not our miseries the same?” This writer eats at his “death each day of [his] life. It feels like practice. It is [his] job.” Luckily for us he takes this difficult task on. This is a book like no other."
Joseph Donahue: “John Clare has slipped the asylum again, returned to the ‘poetical prosings’ that drove him mad, passing himself off, in our time, as ‘Tim Earley.’ These lunatic pages are a continuous delight. They map the linguistic wilds and psychic pasturelands of our moment, where entire lives can unfold in a single deep-breathing sentence. Earley’s dazzling and exact juxtapositions of image call up scene after scene, each with its own pathos, rage, wit, or celebration. We wander, happy to be there.”
Sabrina Orah Mark: "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.
Graham Foust: "Slinging anti-psalms about the Southland, Tim Earley plays chicken to win, thus upending so much of what you thought you thought about the American poem in prose. Herein are oaths--as in both promises and curses--and the good kind of being buried alive."
Selected Reviews:
Abraham Smith at Lost Roads Press
Laurie Saurborn at American Microreviews & Interviews