When Grandfather comes to take his grandson to a concert, Ronan is quiet as they leave the house, quiet in the car, and quiet at the concert hall. But when the performance is over and the beautiful music fades out at last, Ronan opens his mouth...and lets out a great big WOW!

Not any old WOW, but Ronan's very first WOW! That one word fills up the hearts of Ronan's family, the musicians, the audience, and--when the recording goes viral--the world.

In 2018, reeling from marital, parental, and societal losses, acclaimed poet Todd Boss risked everything to be at one with the world. Boss sold his belongings and began to circle the globe in a series of consecutive housesits. He alternately inhabited thatched-roof farmhouses, hillside estates, urban apartments, and lush gardens in Berlin, Barcelona, Austin, Austria, Marrakesh, Singapore, Baltimore, Auckland, and more. The poems in Someday the Plan of a Town are his only souvenirs.

Written under the influence of long walks along the Thames and the Pacific, of mornings at farmers' markets, train stations, and mountaintop basilicas, Someday the Plan of a Town conjures Spanish dust, English rain, French moss, Arizona cliffs, and Hungarian light, ringing all the while with timeless humor and wisdom. At the same time, these poems concern the most domestic of matters--personal grief and familial estrangement, reflections on a changing nation, and a journey of self-discovery that offers a new meaning of home.

As much a commentary on modern-day America as a personal history replete with grief, Someday the Plan of a Town is a sensual, intellectual, and arrestingly musical map of one nomadic troubadour's journey to self.

At the center of Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home--all come crashing down, but Todd Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life (Tony Hoagland).

from Overtures on an Overturned Piano
. . . our hi-beams
played
across the gleaming bed
of snowdrifted bramble
where it lay,
moaning chaotically . . .

At the center of Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home--all come crashing down, but Todd Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life (Tony Hoagland).

From In the End a Gardener

is what we want in our corner
of paradise. Someone alert
to the slant of one hour
of afternoon sunlight or other,
who knows what to plant there,
knows what will thrive.

from Overtures on an Overturned Piano
. . . our hi-beams
played
across the gleaming bed
of snowdrifted bramble
where it lay,
moaning chaotically . . .