Someday the Plan of a Town: Poems

Todd Boss

$26.95

Publication Date: February 15th, 2022

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN:

9780393881400

Pages:

104

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Description

Poems of wayfaring and wayfinding, recovery and discovery, from “one of the best poets of his generation” (Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post).

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.

About the Author

Todd Boss is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently Tough Luck. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other publications. Still nomadic, Boss has most recently been based in Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas.

Praise for Someday the Plan of a Town: Poems

With Someday the Plan of a Town, Todd Boss is part adventurer, part commentator, and total poet. The clarity and chiseled shapeliness of his poems operate in artful irony with Boss’s daring to risk ‘not one but all [his] lives.’ Boss maps the internal discoveries and day-to-day devotions of a great adventure, where renunciation leads not to piety but affirmation, and roving not to avoidance but engagement. In this fine and distinctive book, we learn from experience that ‘noplace is / like home.’

— David Baker, author of Swift

Before we could go nearly nowhere, Todd Boss went everywhere. If you are not dazzled by this introduction alone, something is missing. His poems always seem like a backbone that holds other language up. They seem sturdy as metal. But fluidly elastic, at once. What a gift! What a luminous voice.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next

Todd Boss is a walking violin—his ear so tuned to the hidden rhythms of speech that he could make any sorrow sing. And here, in Someday the Plan of a Town, we’re invited to follow that music around the globe as Boss housesits for strangers and falls in love with each new place, each new life. Yet despite this rich worldliness, Todd Boss’s poems turn resolutely inward, searching tenderly for the contours of the human heart.

— Anders Carlson-Wee, author of The Low Passions

The deepest pleasure in reading these poems is to find oneself at the crossroads where joy and grief meet, as if by surprise, and yet didn’t they know all along that this day of reckoning and recognition would come? Todd Boss broke all the rules, set sail across the globe, and came back with many tales, a few new rules, and a book of poems that honors those crossroads where challenge and delight collide. What a beautiful collision of a book this is!
— Jim Moore, author of Prognosis