Wire Song

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.