"I don't care what you've done. I don't care what happens. I only want to be with you."\nTwins-orphaned as children and reunited after a separation of fourteen years, juvenile detention and alleged abuse in the New York State foster-care system-return to their hometown of Ithaca, New York, seeking vengeance and (in their minds) atonement out of love for the children they were, by the fractured adults they have become. In his fiction debut, poet and dramatist Todd Hearon assembles a troubled, and troubling, cast of characters, both complicated and compelling: the foster father, a former professional wrestler on the New York/New Jersey circuit during the sport's first "Golden Age" of television, who now makes his living as a voyeuristic pool repairman; the foster mother, a religious zealot desperately struggling to protect the children in her charge-thirty-seven to date-from the horrible fate she suspects is happening in her own home; the twins' biological parents: a young mother and adjunct professor, pining away for a life of the mind, who in the course of an unlikely adventure comes to better understand her heart; her husband, a celebrated architect, searching the frozen moments of a Central Park concert video for a shared future that exists, "if they can just get to it in time." No one escapes unscathed-and at least three don't make it out alive-in this expedition deep into the soul of love and longing, a modern mythic quest where even God "becomes too real to be believed."\nTodd Hearon has received a PEN/New England "Discovery" Award, the Friends of Literature Prize (Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation), the Rumi Prize in Poetry (Arts & Letters), the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College), and the Paul Green Playwrights Prize (North Carolina Writers' Network). A Dobie-Paisano Fellow (University of Texas, Austin), he served as the Poet-in-Residence at Dartmouth College and the Frost Place. He lives and teaches in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Do Geese See God

Literature & Fiction

Hearon, Todd

Literary

Neutral Zones Press

Todd Hearon’s haunting debut collection chronicles the twin paths of isolation and desire in the search for meaning and union with others. On his pilgrimage through the lost worlds of earth and the soul, the speaker encounters drought in both the literal and spiritual sense as he confronts desolate landscapes, from the brown remnants of ruined cities, to the depths of the human heart and man’s capacity for utter destruction. Yet even though he frequently encounters darkness, he never ceases to seek beauty. He is a man who wears many faces, from Adam, staring down a bleak future bereft of Paradise, to the doomed poet Shelley, drowned off the coast of Italy. He speaks as a man adrift in his own life, seeking an answer to his emptiness, an estranged traveler through memory and longing. Lyrical and intense, Strange Land is a quest for understanding and human connection.     Strange Land  It goes without saying a word:  the world under cover of midnight snow, what we have known   of pageantry and lilac, leaf and song subsumed in starless silence. Waking at dawn into the tremulous blue   of the room, as in earth’s afterglow, we lie, lidless, listening, as crows call out the ear’s horizons.   What year is it?  Into what country were we born and now must make our way?  Outside the pane the stillness feels ancestral but the ghosts   not yours, not mine.  My émigré, we are cut off.  An ocean to the east churns in chiaroscuro while unseen   ranges to the south deflect our passage, what passage might have been. This country seems the passing of a dream   to a moonscape’s still immitigable white, a land’s amnesia where against the sky three needling black birds fly   and slip like an ellipsis out of sight.        

Strange Land (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Poetry

Southern Illinois University Press

No Other Gods, draws richly on Hearon's gifts as poet and dramatist. From the sonnets and nonce-forms interspersed throughout, to its central thousand-line verse monologue, No Other Gods strikes the full octave with a jazzed, symphonic roots-music. In its play of masks and voices, one meets a pantheon both sacred and profane-Mnemosyne, Priapus; memory and desire-from Pasiphae, ""that daughter of the sun,"" to a junked-out ""toothless whore named Cookie"" of our own century. With mythopoetic propulsion and expanse, No Other Gods is, ultimately, a paean to the human imagination, the force that in the face of negation and nothingness, ""sings well into the night.""

No Other Gods

Salmon Poetry

Eden, a small town in the Great Copper Basin of southeast Tennessee, where 100 years ago, an African-American community is forced out overnight, following the lynching of three young black men; Malaga Island off the coast of rural Maine, where around the same time, a mixed-race community mysteriously disappears on the eve of the State's eviction: these disruptions and dispossessions form the arc of Todd Hearon's new mixed-genre collection on "sundown towns" and communities: areas of the United States that historically have been made, and maintained, all-white. Exploring the effects on the victims--and the perpetrators--Crows in Eden offers an imaginative and empathetic look into buried shame, past dispersions, ongoing denials: the land's abiding legacy of an open wound.&#65279;"Todd Hearon's Crows in Eden is an unflinching look at America's long history of white terrorism and racial expulsion, told by one who knows southern white culture from the inside. Whether he is uncovering the buried sins of Eden, Tennessee, or documenting the banished black community of Malaga Island, Maine, Hearon seeks no less than to reveal, at last, 'a history never written down.' By turns brutally honest and poignantly elegiac, these poems are a vital contribution to the real history of home." -- Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America"In Crows in Eden, Todd Hearon practices that rare brand of poetic ingenuity, one attuned to the modal phrasings of history and those voices carried over time by wind and imagination. Underpinned by a deep faith in language and form, the poems here, perceptive and lyrical, forgo amnesia in favor of a perpetual light, and what Hearon devastatingly uncovers is nothing less than our brutal past, and yes, the paucity of our humanity. Yet Crows in Eden has within its vision that city on the hill, some future America, sustained by moral and just measures of sound and fury." -- Major Jackson

Crows in Eden

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hearon, Todd. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hearon, Todd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hearon, Todd. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Do Geese See God

Strange Land (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

No Other Gods

Crows in Eden