Todd's third poetry collection with W. W. Norton & Company, Tough Luck, includes all thirty-five 35-word poems that make up "Fragments for the 35W Bridge" from his "Project 35W" installation.
The title refers to two poems, "When My Mother Says Tough Luck," and "When My Father Says Toughen Up," selected for Best of the Net.
The book's publication coincides with Todd's tenth consecutive Pushcart Prize nomination. Tough Luck includes poems that first appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Terrain, Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and National and Minnesota Public Radio.
For their support, Todd is grateful to W. W. Norton editor Jill Bialosky and literary agent Nancy Stauffer.
Tough Luck is funny and philosophical and
wry and large-hearted, and it’s our great good luck to have it.
Beth Ann Fennelly
The opening poems from the collection recall Todd's childhood on a Wisconsin farm:
When My Mother Says Tough Luck
it’s like the rough tongue of
leather in a boot somehow,
the way you dig your
thumb in there when it gets
stuck to curl it out again
against the topside
of your foot and pull it flat
so you can truss it up,
or like the slap of milk
on milk in a metal bucket
carried up the ramp
to be dumped in the bulk-
house tank with the rest,
or the clank of the bucket
handle against the bucket’s
flank once the milk’s
poured out and the bucket’s
done its chore, or like the
prayer a shucked off pair
of garden gloves cough
softly when they’re chucked
from the hand and land
filthy on the back porch floor.
Accounting
Its fine
incisors
grinding
my mother
fed my
father’s
fledgling
carpentry
concern
into her
adding
machine
as if its
hunger
could be
satisfied
costs &
savings
spooling
to our
wooden
kitchen
floor &
pooling
amounting
to nothing
a shop tool’s
shavings.
Line Dried Laundry
is by lifting and
lifting in
wind awhile en-
livened, sheets
crispened, denim
roughened,
kitchen cottons
more apt to
cotton to ab-
sorption as if
from one
hour in sun
they’d re-learned
thirst or some-
thing. You
might be for-
given if in
your imagination
wind and light
acquired a
mythification
with or without
your intention.
You might be
forgiven for
keeping
between your
thumb and fore-
finger for-
ever some
fond
recollection of
wooden pins
in all their
wind-worn
nudity.
You might even
run a hand
over an idle
pump handle
one day
as if to say
I knew you when.
But look at me,
talking to
farmers again.
When My Father Says Toughen Up
it’s like the clop of the walnut
block beneath the gavel of the
judge who fits the punishment
to the crime, or like the pop of the
velveteen seedpod of the lupine
finally scattering its ordnance of
shot amongst the hollyhock,
or like the aftershock of a
Massey Ferguson engine cut off
too hot, that chuff out the muffler
that echoes off the pole barn
sharp as a whooping cough,
or like the upstart of a startled
ruffed grouse thumping into
flight right beside you on a walk,
or like the hard clap on the back
you get when you choke, as if
to congratulate you. He doesn’t
say it to berate you, he says it to
hike you up an inch or two, like
when he took you by the collar
when you were little to zip you
into that boiled wool jacket he
sent you out to chores with,
or like the high salute we send
soldiers to wars with.
For an Old Runner
Last time I was out to the farm, I found
a sleigh runner made of timber, banded in iron,
rusting in the machine shop under the granary.
It was my father’s father’s father’s father’s,
and I know I had no business bringing it home
without asking Donny—my second cousin, who
owns and farms the land around the abandoned
farmstead now—but here it hangs, cross-wise
on a wall in my study. Its blunted nose 18 hands
high, it arcs above my head, and when I reach
to touch it—as for want of the feel of old wood I
will from time to time—I might as well be handling
one of the horses that hauled it, its neck a rough
relic, so rough it’s almost smooth with roughness,
its whole body—in the wall beside me imaginary—
haunch-heavy but simultaneously holding
weightlessly still for me, eyes steady, ears keen,
and ready the way horses are always ready, even
stolen horses, even horses one has never driven,
never even seen.
Tough Luck, now in paperback, can be ordered wherever you buy your books.