The Cloud Corporation

Timothy Donnelly’s brilliant, breakneck and beautiful poetry has been hailed as some of the most original and exciting new work to emerge from the US in several years. In The Cloud Corporation, Donnelly shows how a wholly engaged poetic sensibility can uncover both beauty and meaning within the bewilderments and complexities of contemporary life, without simplifying either its subject or its own investigative approach. In a Donnelly poem, the reader is never sure quite where the next line will take them – the poems pursue their narratives and arguments by surreal association one moment, relentless logic the next – but quickly learns that Donnelly’s is a voice to trust, one which can lead them into astonishing and often unexpected clarities. Writing in the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson said ‘If Whitman had had a young kid and a Brooklyn apartment, too many bills, and a stack of takeout menus in the top drawer of his Ikea desk, he would have written these poems.’ The Cloud Corporation is an imaginative tour de force, and a fine introduction to an essential new poet. 'The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work - the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do' Nick Laird