Todd Boss – Författare

Increasingly, Todd Boss has been attracting attention, with poems in the Paris Review and The New Yorker and a series in Poetry. His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

Increasingly, Todd Boss has been attracting attention, with poems in the Paris Review and The New Yorker and a series in Poetry. His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

With poems about loss, home, marriage, and the inner music of our lives, Pitch is a series of variations on an overturned piano. By turns bright and dark like the keys on a keyboard, these poems demonstrate the range of one of contemporary poetry’s most musical poets, a master of internal rhyme.from “Overtures on an Overturned Piano”. . . our hi-beamsplayedacross the gleaming bedof snowdrifted bramblewhere it lay,moaning chaotically . . .

At the centre of Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home—all come crashing down, but Todd Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and “a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life” (Tony Hoagland).

At the center of Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home—all come crashing down, but Todd Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and “a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life” (Tony Hoagland).From “In the End a Gardener”:is what we want in our cornerof paradise. Someone alertto the slant of one hourof afternoon sunlight or other,who knows what to plant there,knows what will thrive.

In 2018, reeling from marital, parental, and societal losses, acclaimed poet Todd Boss risked everything to be at one with the world. Boss sold his belongings and began to circle the globe in a series of consecutive housesits. He alternately inhabited thatched-roof farmhouses, hillside estates, urban apartments, and lush gardens in Berlin, Barcelona, Austin, Austria, Marrakesh, Singapore, Baltimore, Auckland, and more. The poems in Someday the Plan of a Town are his only souvenirs.Written under the influence of long walks along the Thames and the Pacific, of mornings at farmers’ markets, train stations, and mountaintop basilicas, Someday the Plan of a Town conjures Spanish dust, English rain, French moss, Arizona cliffs, and Hungarian light, ringing all the while with timeless humor and wisdom. At the same time, these poems concern the most domestic of matters—personal grief and familial estrangement, reflections on a changing nation, and a journey of self-discovery that offers a new meaning of home.As much a commentary on modern-day America as a personal history replete with grief, Someday the Plan of a Town is a sensual, intellectual, and arrestingly musical map of one nomadic troubadour’s journey to self.