Description
“To read Tim Earley’s Rattle Rib is to witness glorious saplings bust up the asphalt, spider seeds burst from burned out trailers, black bear and blue jay and possum and o’ possum nest in the broken windshield gasoline soda TV pill bottle not-a-bill death machine until the world is cherried and mansions of green again. It’s been a hard hundred human years. Follow Earley’s ley line between the primordial and the aftermath, the sacred and profane. This is the only language I want to speak for a spell and I hope it takes us home.”
—Danielle Pafunda, author of Along the Road Everyone Must Travel
“Not since Thomas Wyatt and the lesser court poets has desire been so peeved, rhetoric so itchy, so fancy, so elaborately fustian, has ‘nature’ been so lavishly tricked out. These poems teach the beauty of electricity, they slap the wrist: ‘wild for to hold.’”
—Sara Nicholson, author of April
“A Tim Earley poem is equal part lung & heart, cleaved, connate and inseparate, like the twin corm of the Aplectrum orchid some call puttyroot or ‘eve-and-adam.’ And like that same plant, Earley prefers the damp and the deciduous. The upland. His fruits are fleshy; his seeds numerous—he can self-pollinate. He’s got a crenate lip. His roots are fibrous. Sliced they’ll exude a substance which aids in reassembling the broken shards of a jug. Tim’s margin is entire; his sepals free and distinct. He flowers in late spring.”
—C Violet Eaton, author of Quartet
Tim Earley is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery and Linthead Stomp. He is also the creator/lead writer of the tabletop roleplaying game, Holler: An Appalachian Apocalypse. Tim teaches online courses in literature and creative writing for the University of Mississippi and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he spends much of his time running trails and looking for bears.