Wire Song

by Mark Todd, Dana Gioia

Mark Todd is the New West incarnate. In Wire Song , Todd's first collection, each poem brings another element of contemporary life in the rural West into focus. Many poems detail the difficult, sometimes comical, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking work of ranching, telling stories of everything from the death of a foal to the arrival of spring, from what kind of hat to wear on the job to the traditional work of a farrier day. In his longer narrative poems, Todd recounts a present in which dirt bikers and ranchers collide (guess who wins), and a past in which he reimagines one of his own notorious forebears, John Wesley Hardin, at the moment he decides to take the path of crime and violence. Throughout Todd's work, there is a delicate balance between the facts of nature and the domesticating work of man, in which something as ordinary as barbed wire comes to embody an entire way of life.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2001

About the author

Todd is a novelist and poet who's read and performed his work across ihe West, on the East Coast, and in Berlin, Germany.

Author of two books of poetry, Wire Song, Conundrum Press, 2001, and Tamped, But Loose Enough to Breathe, Ghost Road Press, 2008.

Co-author (with wife, Kym O'Connell-Todd) of The Silverville Saga Series, including Little Greed Men, All Plucked Up, and The Magicke Outhouse, all from Raspberry Creek Books.

His science fiction novel, Strange Attractors, was released in October, 2012.

His latest work, also co-authored with Kym, is Wild West Ghosts, a nonfiction book on haunted hotels in Colorado.

He and Kym live near Gunnison, Colorado, with four indoor cats, three sometimes indoor dogs, and six horses who definitely have to live in the pasture.