BOOK: Earth Symphony and Other Poems

The 40-page print-on-demand title is exclusively available here.

Not one, but two librettos, "Earth Symphony" and "Cello Songs," are the seeds for a chapbook of Todd's newest nature poems, collected for the first time by Ecstatic Motion Press in 2025. It's the first published book of Todd's poems since Someday the Plan of a Town (W. W. Norton & Co., 2022).

"Earth Symphony," the book's title libretto, was written for composer Jake Runestad, premiered by True Concord Voices and Orchestra in Tucson, won a regional Emmy and was nominated for a Grammy.

Melissa Studdard founded Ecstatic Motion with the mission of publishing great contemporary librettos. A librettist herself, she shares Todd's passion for bringing poets and composers together. A founding member of POCO Labs, which takes an active role as a conduit for fostering new poet + composer collaborations, she sees the press as a significant way to legitimize and celebrate new librettos. Concertgoers are her target audience.

When Melissa asked Todd for a libretto for Ecstatic Motion, he built out a manuscript that included additional poems as a way to introduce readers to his larger body of work. The 40-page chapbook contains eighteen previously uncollected poems that pay tribute to the planet and its intelligences.

"Combining librettos with poems is a great model for our books going forward," says Studdard, "a way of complementing concertgoers' experiences while introducing them to more of the writer's work — a win-win."

In Todd Boss's deft hand, the world in all its magisterial wonder comes into

sharp relief. Here, we meet turtles, sponges, the great phases of night and day that

shape our lives and inspire our wonderment. At times tight and at others expansive, 

Todd Boss's world of poetry and libretti focuses on that perennial joy: the fact that we, too,

get to witness life in all its manifold shapes on this blue-green earth. Listen to the sea,

welcome the moon, hear the susurrations of song sweeping across these pages—

you won't regret it. In fact, you'll be changed for the better.

—Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil

Click here to read (and hear) three of the poems from this collection.

Todd wrote most of the poems while a graduate student in Biomimicry at the University of Arizona during the Covid-19 pandemic. (Biomimicry is an emerging biology discipline that applies nature's evolutionary genius to human design problems.)

The poems in Earth Symphony and Other Poems take inspiration from the hunting methods of humpbacks, the bones in a seahorse, the cleverness of grain, the astronomy in tree rings, and the sororal social structures of bees.

Todd's studies, together with his farm upbringing and his environmentalism, have resulted in a collection that ranges from the wonders of deep-sea silica sponges to the workaday hayfields of his native Wisconsin.

You can read Todd's introduction to the book on his Substack here.

This book is dedicated to Jake Runestad who has very generously shared his commissions with me over the years. I'm forever grateful to him for the vital example he sets by investing in living writer collaborators.