Launching onto the poetry scene with 17 poems in POETRY magazine, a poem in The New Yorker, and a debut collection from W. W. Norton & Company, Todd's first book, Yellowrocket, was named one of the 10 best poetry books of 2008 by Virginia Quarterly Review and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award.
Boss may truly be the up-and-coming master of internal rhyme …
an ambitious first book.
— Georgia Review
If you only buy one book of poetry
this year, make it Yellowrocket.
— Christian Science Monitor
The title poem (below) tells the true story of Todd's boyhood farm in Wisconsin, a kind of reverse Garden of Eden tale that sets the stage for his "lover's quarrel" with God.
Yellowrocket was named a Midwest Bookseller's Choice Honor Book.
"Yellowrocket" is the common name of a weed that overtakes croplands throughout the upper Midwest. A member of the watercress family, its stem is easily broken, which requires farmers to pull the weeds by hand.
Yellowrocket
Filthy, but still of good
tilth, our new bargain 80
(40 high, 40 hinter)
made us instantly
wealthy with rubbish.
Never buy a farm
in winter. For years,
my mother stood
by my father’s side
in thickets choked
with tractor parts
and bedcoil and
cried. Whether grief
or shame or the fact
that people could be
such pigs more
upset her, I never
knew. Didn’t matter.
Whatever it was
filled up our
quarter-ton Ford a
hundred times over.
The work was clay
deep, the debt was
north slope steep.
We could’ve driven
State Highway 27
to the local dump in
our sleep. I grew up in
boiled wool jackets,
thinking soil smelled
like brushfire smoke.
Had holes been coins,
our gloves and boots
would’ve jangled.
Unwitting heirs, we’d
come into a garden
overgrown with plastic
diapers and broken
furniture tangled in
burdock and brambles
and thistle. We’d split
with family and moved
a hundred miles, and
the gamble’s payout
was piles of bent nails
and moldering shingle.
Some messes called
for rake, others shovel.
Either way, by dusk of
day we were down
on our knees picking
window glass shards
from the muck. If we
rested, we rested from
wresting long twists
of rusted barbed wire
from deepening kinks
of birches. Primal
was our desire to take
that junk-pile back
from the skunk and
the snake and the rat.
We were the unsung
angels of our portion
of the plat. And for
all that, on Sundays
the Lord gave us halos
of hat-hair and gnats,
and then, in due season:
the apple’s blossom,
forest floors dappled
with trillium, fields
of tall corn, a barn not
yet fallen, views of the
countryside patterned
with drifting pollen,
berries by the bucketful,
the otherworldly lull
of the breeze in our
break of white pines,
5-wire fences posted
in good straight lines,
the easy spirals
of the golden eagles
that nested in our
hardwoods’ crowns,
the kind of sky
in which a small boy
drowns, our health,
and a feel for the earth
indistinct from
scorn. Call it love,
but if you call it love,
call it a love that
persisted, that
stained the palms
and reeked when
you pulled it,
like yellowrocket.
Click here to hear Todd read "Yellowrocket" and other poems from the collection.
My poetry was "discovered" in Poetry magazine by Sherman Alexie, who emailed me out of the blue one day to ask if he could introduce me to a publisher. Six weeks later I was offered a W. W. Norton contract by the illustrious Carol Houck Smith, whose death followed Yellowrocket's publication by a matter of days. Colleagues called it her swan song. My relationship with the farm is conflicted, like my ideas about the divine. I believe human beings are suffering as a result of being post-agrarian. And the reverse Eden story of "Yellowrocket" is something of an autobiographical articulation of that conflict. God and farming are themes I explore a lot in my poems, since poems are perfect places where conflicted ideas can meet and get a little drunk and fist-fight, if it won't interfere with milking.
