Tim Shaner enlists an imaginary curriculum based in real readings. Its canon is a forgery, but aren’t all canons forgeries? In I Hate Fiction, our narrator is provoked by what they’re reading: Thomas Bernhard, Lyn Hejinian, Kathy Acker; but also whatever’s on television, at the store, the baby’s crying, the phone is ringing

 

Tim Shaner, I Hate Fiction, Spuyten Duyvil,

2018

Tim Shaner’s poet’s novel is a page-turner! He carries all the addictive qualities of wringing the world through poetry with prose, a sense of absolute frankness at work. Shaner aims at our culture’s many irritable limbs, yet he brings the poets alive, weaving them and waving hello with them from inside the deep muscle of the book. You are going to love this! - CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

In I Hate Fiction a character named Tim Shaner is working on a piece of fiction in the style of Thomas Bernhard to avoid working on his dissertation. If by working on it, we mean thinking a lot about it. And thinking about other things too. The neighbor’s jeep, what he knows about who in the Buffalo Poetics Program. Rob Greiner, that sort of stuff. Poets write the darndest novels. And this one is funny, irreverent, and meta. - Juliana Spahr, author of That Night the Wolf Came

For we who admit our love of splendid artifice, Tim Shaner’s I Hate Fiction arrives just in time. I Hate Fiction enlists an imaginary curriculum based in real readings. Its canon is a forgery, but aren’t all canons forgeries? In I Hate Fiction, our narrator is provoked by what they’re reading: Thomas Bernhard, Lyn Hejinian, Kathy Acker; but also whatever’s on television, at the store, the baby’s crying, the phone is ringing, and do not neglect whatever is brewing over at the porter’s lodge. This is a fierce, funny, and totally fictional book whose polemic gestures towards what we might actually find ourselves believing in. I can’t see how this book doesn’t win the National Book Award a few months after its release. I loved it. - Brandon Brown, author of The Good Life and Top 40

Tim Shaner, Noch Ein at the Stein: A poetic essay

on beer, conversation, and hippycrits. Spuyten

Duyvil, 2021

Here’s why I LOVE this book to death: I’m here at the Stein and I’m not a regular but I’ve somehow managed to snag myself a stool at the bar and there’s this middle-aged guy, this character, this quintessential loafer, this self-mocking “poet (brewer)” musing, pontificating, philosophizing, conversing with his shoulder buddies. And I’m just following the conversation as it meanders from the communist horizon to hippycrits to books and neoliberalism and art and zebrafish and death and taxes and what men want and women, too, and all that jazz (he loves jazz). And he’s playing with words, he’s definitely got his buzz on. He’s dropping names like loose change and there’s a wild cast of characters sometimes here in the bar—Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, William Burroughs, Liz Taylor, George Harrison…—and he’s telling stories, making things up, making excuses, making things meta. Seriously, this book is wickedly funny… and damn, it’s serious. So I’m still here at the bar at the Stein and I can’t leave yet, I’m always wanting just another wee one, one more Shaner, Noch Ein at the Stein. - Karen McPherson, author of Skein of Light and co-editor of Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature

At the Stein almost every soul can become a shoulder-buddy. Brush shoulders then, be pertinent. Belong. Bring your best remembered books, dances, jams. Bring conundrums and pesky syllogisms. Bring loves renewed or dreamed or left at the subway platform. Make note. Bring your hope-with-disillusion. Whether wizened or supple, the Stein servers-and-preservers, all sharpen the wort of Shaner’s human moment like the bold hops for which Northwest ales are known. Our summers grow hotter. So have a gulp. Listen, and counter. Some drink to remember, Tim Shaner is one of that sum. - Tim Whitsel, author of We Say Ourselves and Wishmeal

In Noch Ein at the Stein, Tim Shaner captures the essential elements of why the Stein is my favorite bar in America. The beer community, the stories, the very human social contact & interaction, and, above all, the celebration of beer—I have experienced all these and more at "the Stein," even meeting a poet of note. Noch Ein is a must read for all those who love bar life and life itself. It is even more poignant during these Covid times when that sense of "Communitas" has been taken away. - Hal Hermanson, KLCC Brewfest Operations/Brewer's Lounge, Underwriting, & fellow “Steinian”

Tim Shaner, Picture X, 2014

Poetry. Tim Shaner's PICTURE X is a journey through the "poethics" of nature writing in a time marked by the catastrophes of war and impending environmental collapse. Rather than heed Thoreau's admonishment to leave the domesticated world behind on one's walks through the Wild, Shaner does the opposite, bringing the schizophrenic chatter of postmodernity into the built environment of the park, in this case Spencer Butte, a wooded park at the southern tip of Eugene, Oregon. Here, the poet refuses to yield entirely to what Thoreau calls the "subtle magnetism of Nature" in place of confronting the political realities traditionally buried by the picturesque.

"In Tim Shaner's PICTURE X, a poet from 'back east,' floored by the natural beauty of the west, confesses his desire to enter into its majesty without tripping over the undergrowth of clichéd naturalism. Irresistibly drawn into description by the manifold shapeliness of the environment, he registers his resistance through a series of startling, mimetic mindscapes. Many hilarious and/or catastrophic moments ensue. It's a wild ride! 'These trees / you know / they're so / lazy — / they just / stand there...' Who can blame them?"—Kit Robinson

"Bemused, bewildered, bedeviled, these poems are imbued with the everyday charm of companionability. Shaner mixes close observations of the social, natural, and linguistic, offering, along the way, philosophical reflections on working, living, and becoming a being being."—Charles Bernstein