Todd Boss

cantfindit

Todd Boss is a poet, film producer, public artist, librettist, and inventor. He grew up on a cattle farm in Wisconsin, and he earned a BA at St. Olaf College and an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage. His first poetry collection, Yellowrocket (W.W. Norton, 2008), was named one of the 10 best poetry books of 2008 by Virginia Quarterly Review and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He is also the author of Pitch (W.W. Norton, 2012), which won the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for Poetry, and Tough Luck (W.W. Norton, 2016). His poetry has been featured in the New Yorker, Poetry magazine, the American Poetry Review, The Times (London), Ted Kooser’s newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” and on National Public Radio.  It has been anthologized in Best American Poetry and elsewhere.

 

The World Is in Pencil

—not pen. It’s got

 

that same silken

dust about it, doesn’t it,

 

that same sense of

having been roughed

 

onto paper even  

as it was planned.

 

It had to be a labor

of love. It must’ve

 

taken its author some

time, some shove.

 

I’ll bet it felt good

in the hand—the o

 

of the ocean, and

the and and the and

 

of the land.

Published:

2011

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Memory & The Past

Literary Devices:

Bleeding Title

when the title of a poem acts as the first line

Extended Metaphor

a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem