Tough Luck: Poems

by Todd Boss

Overview

“[Todd Boss]’s poems generate their own rambunctious music and remind us ‘yes, / miracles happen.’ ”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393608625
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Todd Boss is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently Tough Luck. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and other publications. Still nomadic, Boss has most recently been based in Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas.

Editorial Reviews

"Bookended with poems about what persists and what crumbles . . . Boss's poems have a distinct—and satisfying—rhythm."

Star Tribune

"[W]idely regarded as one of the best poets of his generation. . . . [Boss] us[es] brilliant wordplay and portray[s] the people and landscape of his childhood in Wisconsin with clarity and hard-edged grace."

Washington Post

"It’s deeply satisfying to be swept into the music that scores Todd Boss’s third book, Tough Luck, to delight in the song of everyday speech refreshed and refined through sly rhyme. It is deeply transporting to be ferried across the river of his metaphors, to arrive at places logical yet magical. And it’s deeply delightful to walk in the world of Boss’s objects—a wall-mounted coffee grinder, an old farm sled, and unused Scrabble tiles ‘sitting there in their tray like dumbstruck parishioners.’ Tough Luck is funny and philosophical and wry and large-hearted, and it’s our great good luck to have it."

Beth Ann Fennelly

★ 04/15/2017
Boss (Yellowrocket; Pitch) made a splash on the contemporary poetry scene with his first two collections; he also represents that rarely found phenomenon, a poet whose habitat is not the academy. This new collection revolves around an elegiac sequence that addresses the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis. The lasting pieces are likely to be neither the heartfelt, ribbonlike outcries nor the rather bitter divorce poems but the skilled lyrics that riff brilliantly on our stalest phrases ("When My Mother Says Tough Luck"; "A Little Hard Work Won't Kill Ya") and the palpable textures of poems such as "A Hoard of Driftwood" and "A Bouquet," or the surprising delicacy of "Soon I Wake Among New Hills." Boss's "Eve" (yes, that Eve, and a sonnet in couplets, no less) demonstrates the power of his sympathies in concert with his surprising music, rich and graceful at one go—this poem alone is worth the price of admission. VERDICT Boss is a poet to watch, likely to prove one of the leading voices of the next decade. Readers may be drawn into this collection for the poems that touch on disaster and divorce, but they'll stay for the memorable verses on nature and memory.—Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

Library Journal

"Todd Boss charms, and sometimes instructs, and sometimes simply awes the reader."

Alicia Ostriker

"[Boss] us[es] brilliant wordplay and portray[s] the people and landscape of his childhood in Wisconsin with clarity and hard-edged grace."

The Washington Post