Acclaimed Twin Cities poet Todd Boss — a featured author at MinnPost’s 2011 Book Club Blast — couldn’t be happier about the release of his new poetry collection, “Pitch” (W.W. Norton), which has spent its first four weeks on the poetry best-seller list.
“Pitch” follows Boss’s ambitious debut poetry collection, “Yellowrocket” (W.W. Norton), which was named one of the 10 best poetry books of 2009 by Virginia Quarterly, nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and selected as the Midwest Bookseller Association’s Honor Book for Poetry.
According to Boss, the poems in “Pitch” all spiral from a specific event: the time his father lost the family piano off the back of his pickup truck when Boss was 12.
“The accident took place at the very rural, heavily forested corner of County Highway NL and State Highway 27, just east of Fall Creek, Wisconsin,” recalls Boss on his blog.
With poems about loss, home, marriage and the inner music of life — by turns light and dark like the keys on a keyboard — “Pitch” is a series of variations on that overturned piano.
Recognized among contemporary poets for his musicality and facility with internal rhyme, Boss has infused “Pitch” with rhythm, movement, agility, physicality and texture.
According to fellow Minnesota poet Jim Moore, in “Pitch,” Boss “re-creates the world as music — one thinks of Frost, of Kay Ryan — that undoes us even as it enchants us.”
To celebrate the “Pitch” book launch, Boss will give a reading in the Target Performance Hall at The Loft Literary Center on March 14.
The reading will be followed by a book signing, where Boss will be giving away copies of his favorite sheet of piano music: “Poem,” by Zdenko Fibich.
Fans of Boss can also look forward to the fall 2012 premiere of “Panic,” his verse retelling of Knut Hamson’s novella “Pan”as an evening-length piece for piano and voice, arranged by Boston Conservatory’s Andy Vores.
Date: Wednesday, Mar. 14, 2012
Place: The Loft Literary Center, 1011 Washington Ave. S., # 301, Open Book, Minneapolis, MN 55415
