Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher born and raised in Nashville, TN. His debut poetry collection, Gatherer, was published by Belle Point Press in the spring, and his poems have previously appeared at EcoTheo Review, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife, their son, and their three cats.

Other poems on the web by Todd Osborne:
Five poems
"Running with the Bull"
"Ode to Morning"
"Ode to August Walker"
"Saturday"
"Letter Written in St. Augustine"
"A History of Trees"
"A History of Decks"

About 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

"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

"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