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.
Hear Todd read this poem and others from Someday the Plan of a Town.
Follow the links below for some archived readings from Someday the Plan of a Town.
February 23, 2022 | Joseph Beth Booksellers
March 4, 2022 | Gramercy Books
March 21, 2022 | Magers & Quinn
April 21, 2022 | Literati Bookstore
Subscribe on Todd's "about" page for updates and ongoing reading schedule.
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.
