ORBITS 52, poetry by Timothy Dodd
Publication Date: May15, 2025
Paperback, 90 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-03-1
Explore eternity with Timothy Dodd, riding shotgun through the Appalachian heartland of Orbits 52. This introspective journey follows a son and father as they traverse the steep reaches of Route 52, the King Coal highway. Amidst abandoned hollers and radio static, Dodd weaves a delectably surreal examination of vanishing traditions, the sore truth of environmental decline, and the shared weariness of human and natural grief: “Blackness under and out of the ground, blackness to burn. Our heads, too, burn, under and out of the ground, combustible.” Stylistically smart and packed with dark humor and sore history, Dodd offers a dizzying compression of time and place, recognizing what’s left unsaid and what’s left to rot: “We are passing Ennis / Mountains leading us like wreathing black / snakes. Where has all / that coal money gone?” Finality is illusionary in Orbits 52, a land of striking beauty and roads that lead to nowhere, a nowhere that has always been home.
Praise for Timothy Dodd & Orbits 52
Epic in its scope and cinematic in its approach, Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 is a must-read for anyone who wishes to come to terms with the material and spiritual conditions of present-day West Virginia. From the Blakean music of his aphorisms to Wheel of Fortune overheard on a television in the next room, Dodd shifts registers moment by moment, digging into substrate, not unlike “Over one hundred mines carved near / these thirty-three miles of pavement, / and a hundred more on to Matewan…” On the surface, Dodd is reporting a road trip down King Coal Highway—his father’s reluctant passenger—to visit his mother committed long ago to a mental health facility, but it is in fact a complete history animated by a voice that is generous, piercing, vulnerable.
—Jacob Strautmann, author of The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business & New Vrindaban
Orbits 52 takes readers on a cosmic road trip along Route 52 in southern West Virginia, father at the wheel, grown son in the passenger seat. On the way to visit the wife of one, mother of the other, hillsides “pass on either side of us, the deep woods and sedimentary rock faces moving.” The son’s sight-seeing narrative transforms the ordinary to the extraordinary in an account of wonders that include the monstrous and the innocent—trilobites with calcite-lensed eyes based on eyes formed millennia before; local cryptids; and gods from old mythologies appear and then vanish, seeming as natural and as supernatural as the possum, bear, and deer that roam the woods. Scenes appear, disappear, and reappear in a verbal magic-lantern show that demonstrates the relation between sight and insight. Enigmatic in spirit and yet natural in language, Orbits 52 blends the poetic and the ordinary, making even heirloom tomatoes and convenience stores part of this high- and low-spirited tour through time and space.
—Edwina Pendarvis, author of Ghost Dance Poems & Another World, Ballet Lessons from Appalachia
Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 follows the illustrious tradition of the “road poem”. He names himself as narrator, and it is clear at the outset that the journey is personal, and biographical with a mouldy air of claustrophobia and last chances, travelling by car with his father through the Appalachian backroads of West Virginia, a country that is for him both strange and strangely familiar. As father and son follow the mountain roads through a wasteland of failed towns and failed resolve, the mining outback left to fend for itself in a country seemingly forgotten by governments in a slow decline into economic stagnation, we witness the passing landscape, where Route 52 only marginally qualifies as within the boundary of the Civilised. Dodd is adept at utilising the device of (Homeric) cataloguing to set his passing frames of reference within the scope of a greater narrative and sense of time. Time itself is fluid, and a simple view of the passing landscape drops us into scenarios of Deep Time, where foresight and hindsight are skewed. The “orbitals” of (Route) 52 are metaphorical in the reflective sense of return journeys, but, too, set in a present, desperate reality. Again, the skull’s orbitals double as both anatomy and as a seer’s anchor points, with other apt references salted through this thoughtful and evocative poem. “You cannot see the road ahead, but faith / in your vehicle and the highway does not / waver. Even when the darkness falls, you / carry two beams of light, enough wattage / to blind owl, opossum, and your own soul. / (...) There is no beginning and end.”
—Estill Pollock, author of Ark, Heathen Anthems, & others
About the Author
Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, West Virginia. He is the author of short story collections Small Town Mastodons (Cowboy Jamboree Press), Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), Men in Midnight Bloom (Cowboy Jamboree Press), and Mortality Birds (Southernmost Books, with Steve Lambert), as well as poetry collections Galaxy Drip (Luchador Press), Modern Ancient (High Window Press) and Vital Decay (Cajun Mutt Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers; his poetry in Roanoke Review, Crannog, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Tim is co-editor at Southernmost Books as well as a visual artist who primarily exhibits his work in the Philippines. His expressionistic oil paintings can also be sampled on both Instagram @timothybdoddartwork and timothydoddart.crevado.com.
Tim completed his B.A. in comparative religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his MFA in the bilingual creative writing program at the University of Texas El Paso. He is an avid traveler and has spent extensive time in such places as Zimbabwe, Chile, Ethiopia, and the Republic of Georgia. Visit him at timothybdodd.wordpress.com.
Publication Date: May15, 2025
Paperback, 90 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-03-1
Explore eternity with Timothy Dodd, riding shotgun through the Appalachian heartland of Orbits 52. This introspective journey follows a son and father as they traverse the steep reaches of Route 52, the King Coal highway. Amidst abandoned hollers and radio static, Dodd weaves a delectably surreal examination of vanishing traditions, the sore truth of environmental decline, and the shared weariness of human and natural grief: “Blackness under and out of the ground, blackness to burn. Our heads, too, burn, under and out of the ground, combustible.” Stylistically smart and packed with dark humor and sore history, Dodd offers a dizzying compression of time and place, recognizing what’s left unsaid and what’s left to rot: “We are passing Ennis / Mountains leading us like wreathing black / snakes. Where has all / that coal money gone?” Finality is illusionary in Orbits 52, a land of striking beauty and roads that lead to nowhere, a nowhere that has always been home.
Praise for Timothy Dodd & Orbits 52
Epic in its scope and cinematic in its approach, Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 is a must-read for anyone who wishes to come to terms with the material and spiritual conditions of present-day West Virginia. From the Blakean music of his aphorisms to Wheel of Fortune overheard on a television in the next room, Dodd shifts registers moment by moment, digging into substrate, not unlike “Over one hundred mines carved near / these thirty-three miles of pavement, / and a hundred more on to Matewan…” On the surface, Dodd is reporting a road trip down King Coal Highway—his father’s reluctant passenger—to visit his mother committed long ago to a mental health facility, but it is in fact a complete history animated by a voice that is generous, piercing, vulnerable.
—Jacob Strautmann, author of The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business & New Vrindaban
Orbits 52 takes readers on a cosmic road trip along Route 52 in southern West Virginia, father at the wheel, grown son in the passenger seat. On the way to visit the wife of one, mother of the other, hillsides “pass on either side of us, the deep woods and sedimentary rock faces moving.” The son’s sight-seeing narrative transforms the ordinary to the extraordinary in an account of wonders that include the monstrous and the innocent—trilobites with calcite-lensed eyes based on eyes formed millennia before; local cryptids; and gods from old mythologies appear and then vanish, seeming as natural and as supernatural as the possum, bear, and deer that roam the woods. Scenes appear, disappear, and reappear in a verbal magic-lantern show that demonstrates the relation between sight and insight. Enigmatic in spirit and yet natural in language, Orbits 52 blends the poetic and the ordinary, making even heirloom tomatoes and convenience stores part of this high- and low-spirited tour through time and space.
—Edwina Pendarvis, author of Ghost Dance Poems & Another World, Ballet Lessons from Appalachia
Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 follows the illustrious tradition of the “road poem”. He names himself as narrator, and it is clear at the outset that the journey is personal, and biographical with a mouldy air of claustrophobia and last chances, travelling by car with his father through the Appalachian backroads of West Virginia, a country that is for him both strange and strangely familiar. As father and son follow the mountain roads through a wasteland of failed towns and failed resolve, the mining outback left to fend for itself in a country seemingly forgotten by governments in a slow decline into economic stagnation, we witness the passing landscape, where Route 52 only marginally qualifies as within the boundary of the Civilised. Dodd is adept at utilising the device of (Homeric) cataloguing to set his passing frames of reference within the scope of a greater narrative and sense of time. Time itself is fluid, and a simple view of the passing landscape drops us into scenarios of Deep Time, where foresight and hindsight are skewed. The “orbitals” of (Route) 52 are metaphorical in the reflective sense of return journeys, but, too, set in a present, desperate reality. Again, the skull’s orbitals double as both anatomy and as a seer’s anchor points, with other apt references salted through this thoughtful and evocative poem. “You cannot see the road ahead, but faith / in your vehicle and the highway does not / waver. Even when the darkness falls, you / carry two beams of light, enough wattage / to blind owl, opossum, and your own soul. / (...) There is no beginning and end.”
—Estill Pollock, author of Ark, Heathen Anthems, & others
About the Author
Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, West Virginia. He is the author of short story collections Small Town Mastodons (Cowboy Jamboree Press), Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), Men in Midnight Bloom (Cowboy Jamboree Press), and Mortality Birds (Southernmost Books, with Steve Lambert), as well as poetry collections Galaxy Drip (Luchador Press), Modern Ancient (High Window Press) and Vital Decay (Cajun Mutt Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers; his poetry in Roanoke Review, Crannog, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Tim is co-editor at Southernmost Books as well as a visual artist who primarily exhibits his work in the Philippines. His expressionistic oil paintings can also be sampled on both Instagram @timothybdoddartwork and timothydoddart.crevado.com.
Tim completed his B.A. in comparative religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his MFA in the bilingual creative writing program at the University of Texas El Paso. He is an avid traveler and has spent extensive time in such places as Zimbabwe, Chile, Ethiopia, and the Republic of Georgia. Visit him at timothybdodd.wordpress.com.
Publication Date: May15, 2025
Paperback, 90 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-03-1
Explore eternity with Timothy Dodd, riding shotgun through the Appalachian heartland of Orbits 52. This introspective journey follows a son and father as they traverse the steep reaches of Route 52, the King Coal highway. Amidst abandoned hollers and radio static, Dodd weaves a delectably surreal examination of vanishing traditions, the sore truth of environmental decline, and the shared weariness of human and natural grief: “Blackness under and out of the ground, blackness to burn. Our heads, too, burn, under and out of the ground, combustible.” Stylistically smart and packed with dark humor and sore history, Dodd offers a dizzying compression of time and place, recognizing what’s left unsaid and what’s left to rot: “We are passing Ennis / Mountains leading us like wreathing black / snakes. Where has all / that coal money gone?” Finality is illusionary in Orbits 52, a land of striking beauty and roads that lead to nowhere, a nowhere that has always been home.
Praise for Timothy Dodd & Orbits 52
Epic in its scope and cinematic in its approach, Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 is a must-read for anyone who wishes to come to terms with the material and spiritual conditions of present-day West Virginia. From the Blakean music of his aphorisms to Wheel of Fortune overheard on a television in the next room, Dodd shifts registers moment by moment, digging into substrate, not unlike “Over one hundred mines carved near / these thirty-three miles of pavement, / and a hundred more on to Matewan…” On the surface, Dodd is reporting a road trip down King Coal Highway—his father’s reluctant passenger—to visit his mother committed long ago to a mental health facility, but it is in fact a complete history animated by a voice that is generous, piercing, vulnerable.
—Jacob Strautmann, author of The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business & New Vrindaban
Orbits 52 takes readers on a cosmic road trip along Route 52 in southern West Virginia, father at the wheel, grown son in the passenger seat. On the way to visit the wife of one, mother of the other, hillsides “pass on either side of us, the deep woods and sedimentary rock faces moving.” The son’s sight-seeing narrative transforms the ordinary to the extraordinary in an account of wonders that include the monstrous and the innocent—trilobites with calcite-lensed eyes based on eyes formed millennia before; local cryptids; and gods from old mythologies appear and then vanish, seeming as natural and as supernatural as the possum, bear, and deer that roam the woods. Scenes appear, disappear, and reappear in a verbal magic-lantern show that demonstrates the relation between sight and insight. Enigmatic in spirit and yet natural in language, Orbits 52 blends the poetic and the ordinary, making even heirloom tomatoes and convenience stores part of this high- and low-spirited tour through time and space.
—Edwina Pendarvis, author of Ghost Dance Poems & Another World, Ballet Lessons from Appalachia
Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 follows the illustrious tradition of the “road poem”. He names himself as narrator, and it is clear at the outset that the journey is personal, and biographical with a mouldy air of claustrophobia and last chances, travelling by car with his father through the Appalachian backroads of West Virginia, a country that is for him both strange and strangely familiar. As father and son follow the mountain roads through a wasteland of failed towns and failed resolve, the mining outback left to fend for itself in a country seemingly forgotten by governments in a slow decline into economic stagnation, we witness the passing landscape, where Route 52 only marginally qualifies as within the boundary of the Civilised. Dodd is adept at utilising the device of (Homeric) cataloguing to set his passing frames of reference within the scope of a greater narrative and sense of time. Time itself is fluid, and a simple view of the passing landscape drops us into scenarios of Deep Time, where foresight and hindsight are skewed. The “orbitals” of (Route) 52 are metaphorical in the reflective sense of return journeys, but, too, set in a present, desperate reality. Again, the skull’s orbitals double as both anatomy and as a seer’s anchor points, with other apt references salted through this thoughtful and evocative poem. “You cannot see the road ahead, but faith / in your vehicle and the highway does not / waver. Even when the darkness falls, you / carry two beams of light, enough wattage / to blind owl, opossum, and your own soul. / (...) There is no beginning and end.”
—Estill Pollock, author of Ark, Heathen Anthems, & others
About the Author
Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, West Virginia. He is the author of short story collections Small Town Mastodons (Cowboy Jamboree Press), Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), Men in Midnight Bloom (Cowboy Jamboree Press), and Mortality Birds (Southernmost Books, with Steve Lambert), as well as poetry collections Galaxy Drip (Luchador Press), Modern Ancient (High Window Press) and Vital Decay (Cajun Mutt Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers; his poetry in Roanoke Review, Crannog, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Tim is co-editor at Southernmost Books as well as a visual artist who primarily exhibits his work in the Philippines. His expressionistic oil paintings can also be sampled on both Instagram @timothybdoddartwork and timothydoddart.crevado.com.
Tim completed his B.A. in comparative religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his MFA in the bilingual creative writing program at the University of Texas El Paso. He is an avid traveler and has spent extensive time in such places as Zimbabwe, Chile, Ethiopia, and the Republic of Georgia. Visit him at timothybdodd.wordpress.com.