Gatherer

Gatherer, by Todd Osborne

What does it mean to belong when all the foundations are cracked? This debut poetry collection works toward many answers, attempting to shape a life inside deep loss and abiding love. Todd Osborne navigates questions of home and family amidst the complexities of Southern culture and personal grief. At its heart, Gatherer seeks solace in a faith that eludes without entirely fading. In every setting, the poet quietly lets us into a world in which "each day we survive feels like a miracle"—and we are left more attuned to its ordinary wonder.

Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher originally from Nashville. He is a feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and a poetry reader for Memorious. His poems have been featured at Scrawl Place, CutBank, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and EcoTheo Review. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his wife and their three cats.

Praise for Gatherer:

“In a world on fire, what is poetry’s role? Todd Osborne’s powerful debut answers this question through perfectly placed observations of ordinary moments that become extraordinary through his command of language, image, and humor. Osborne brings to the page a generous, enthusiastic, and unbridled love of the world. In Gatherer “everything feels like Mercy,” and this collection serves as a guide for finding moments of clarity, wholeness, and beauty in a time of fragmentation and loss.”

—Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea and Circle Back

“Todd Osborne’s gem-like debut collection exhilarates, its poems generous enough to encompass both small pleasures—the open-car-window ‘zephyr’ that ‘wilds’ the face, the fun of gathering food for an impromptu wedding-day feast—and large regrets, for the world’s engrained malaise; and, more intimately, for a grandfather’s long death by denaturing illness. Osborne has taken to heart Conrad’s dictum: ‘In the destructive element immerse.’ This book is no treatise. It is both wedding song and elegy—a book of peace overriding conflict, a book of love that summons what’s lost and makes of it a new and lasting beauty.”

—Angela Ball, author of Talking Pillow and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds

“‘Each day we survive / feels like a miracle.’ Todd Osborne’s lovely debut collection, Gatherer, wrangles so honestly and intimately with the immediacies of living and teaching and loving in the South amidst hurricanes and tornadoes, empty pandemic classrooms, and grotesque tours of antebellum mansions that avoid slavery and revel in soldiers’ limbs, that you’ll want to keep listening, especially to the painful silences: ‘my mouth is an arm—.’ Collectively, these finely wrought lyrics embody the simultaneity of disaster and love through formal flexibility: the repetition of Markov sonnets tackle living political histories, while an epithalamium turns ars poetica—‘poets only write about one thing: love and how it moves within them.’ Amidst this all, in the dualities, a marked vastness: of a step-ladder replacing a deck: ‘If one wanted, a step into / sky; if one wanted, anything at all.’”

—Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Oh You Robot Saints! and
Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country 

Details:

• Publication date: April 9, 2024
  
• ISBN: 978-1-960215-16-1
• Trim size: 6 x 9 in
• 94 pages

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