BOOK: Someday the Plan of a Town

Todd's years of nomadic house-sitting resulted in Someday the Plan of a Town, his fourth poetry collection from W. W. Norton & Co., released in February 2022.

Reeling from marital, parental, and societal losses, Todd risked everything to be at peace with the world, in a journey that took him all the way around it.

The poems conjure Spanish dust, English rain, French moss, Australian seacoast, Arizona cliffs, and Hungarian light, ringing all the while with timeless humor and wisdom. Way-finding among such themes as love, loss, estrangement, sexuality, consumerism, and religion, Someday the Plan of a Town is a sensual, intellectual, and arrestingly musical map of one nomadic troubadour’s journey to self.

What a gift! What a luminous voice.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Todd Boss broke all the rules, set sail across the globe, and came back with poems that honor those crossroads where challenge and delight collide.

— Jim Moore

The book is illustrated throughout with small-town map linocuts by Canadian printmaker Pamela Gerbrandt, whose work Todd discovered on Etsy.

Someday the Plan of a Town is a catalog of enchantments that opens with the book's title poem, below.

Someday the Plan of a Town

—right down to its sidetracks and back

alleyways—will match—or so goes

the dream—with some identical patch

of neural network your rogue thoughts

roam in—overlay it like those musculo-

skeletal transparencies with which

anatomy textbooks come bound—and

you’ll be at home in its dogleg jointwork

of cobbled kinks—and your body will

resound at every fork, tuning-fork-like—

and every road you ever rambled will be

re-scrambled to appear to have brought

you here where you fit so perfectly, where

you can practically predict where to find

every bench or postbox, and where you

can cue every little old lady who leaves

her flat to buy bread—as if she were

locking up a little room in your head

and trading your idea of money for your

idea of food before returning to wipe

her shoes on the mat your mind’s laid flat

and fit her flat key to its shoulder into

the strike plate keyhole through which you

daily romance her as she grows older—

that worn, dome-topped slot that looks

as if two question marks met on the road

to kiss and mate and make one question

opening, opening—each forever the

other’s only answer.

The poems themselves are vintage Boss, full of winsome observations

and enough internal rhymes to put Kay Ryan to shame. 

                — California Review of Books

Todd Boss’ poems are secular devotionals to the full spectrum of our days—his ear is tuned to the broad register of the human experience—what we are desperate for, what we grieve, what is worthy of our praise, what is playful, what couldn’t matter more, or ultimately less—these are just some of the notes of his symphonic sensibility.  And perhaps most appealing among his register is his great fidelity to the sense-making force of language that animates his poems and their occasions. His poems refuse to skate lightly on top of the messiness of a moment—they beautifully move in and show more, revealing resonances with a lyric touch that feels to me both incredibly daring in its ambition and especially rare in its sonic excellence. Those who delight in the English language’s textures and nuances will find great pleasure in the way Boss tunes his ear toward a richer palette

than passes for the norm in most contemporary poetry.

— Tyler Meier, University of Arizona Poetry Center

“I travel like some drink—to be lost,” Todd Boss writes, and, yes, that is true: he does travel, he does get lost. But at the heart of these journeys is a little something called pleasure: pleasure in the language, pleasure in the way the mind works, sputters, then begins again to work; pleasure in the world moment-by-moment. However, the deepest pleasure in reading these poems is to find oneself at the crossroads where joy and grief meet in a poem, as if by surprise, and yet didn't they know all along that this day of reckoning and recognition would come?  What a beautiful collision of a book this is!

—Jim Moore, author of Enter

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

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

“I learn by going where I have to go,” wrote Theodore Roethke, and in this remarkable book, Todd Boss shows us just what it means to take such a precept to heart. For two years, he has traced an itinerant course across the globe; for the duration of thirty-seven poems, he follows the itinerant path of aural affinity (of buried rhyme and sonic echo) to map a way forward. It’s palpable here:  poetry is a life raft, a secret repository of wit, a prompt to freshly awakened curiosity. Poetry is at times, admittedly, a vessel for residual bitterness.  Poetry is, best of all, a field for the reinvention of delight, even as our beloved planet spins toward apparent doom. All praise to the journey, and all praise to these poems.                                                             — Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

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An epic global migration, caused largely by climate change but exacerbated by fear-driven socioeconomic policymaking, will characterize the coming century. We are soon to become a planet of nomads, trading the known for the unknown, increasingly dependent upon one another, forced to content ourselves with less.