Donnelly published his first book of poems,
Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, with Grove Press in 2003. His second collection,
The Cloud Corporation, was published by Wave Books in 2010 and in the United Kingdom by Picador in 2011. It was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Donnelly's third collection,
The Problem of the Many, was published in 2019, and his fourth,
Chariot, was released by Wave Books in 2023. His poems have been translated into several languages, including German, Italian, Spanish, and Albanian. A full-length German edition of his work was published by Luxbooks in 2008. Donnelly served as the poetry editor of the
Boston Review from 1996 to 2018.{{cite web |title=Timothy Donnelly |url=https://www.bostonreview.net/authors/timothy-donnelly/ ==Awards and honors==