BOOKS

POETRY

Crab Orchard Poetry Series

Selected by Natasha Trethewey

(Southern Illinois University Press, 2010)

"...beautiful, uncompromising poems." — David Ferry

"This is a first book of rare mastery." — Robert Pinsky

“At once inventive and elegant, hungering and assured, immediate and literary, visceral and visionary, the poems of Strange Land range broadly across the idiomatic and the oracular with a lyric economy that is as deftly accomplished as it is exhilarating. Strange Land is an exceptional first book, ambitious and necessary.” ― Daniel Tobin

“‘My mind was a voyage hungering to happen,’ writes Todd Hearon in Strange Land, a book that confronts the conundrum of human ambition, both public and private, and its translating effects—the translation of ambition into hubris, of the ‘memory of our innocence’ into ‘the hell we made of earth...[the] hell we made of each other.’ Hearon’s particular achievement is to have translated this heritage of human failings into something akin to grace, a debut at once hushed and stirring.”— Carl Phillips

“Strange Land is heady fare, and hearty, too. Hearon is at once intellectual and passionate, a master of both the fish-eye lens and the zoom, equally at home in longer sequences and in epigrams. His formal mind is always in the service of what I can only call a vatic spirit, and his poems are (as poems should be) both aesthetic islands and maps of the mainland where we live. They are psalms (and salaams) for our world. In the fleece of these poems (to paraphrase one of them) the beast to bear us onward comes.” — Geoffrey Brock

No Other Gods

(Salmon Poetry, 2015)

"The mastery displayed in Todd Hearon's No Other Gods—in the complexity and clarity of his rhetorical frames, the beauty and balance of his artifacts, the power and freedom of his imagination, the precision of his music, his anthropological stringency—is astonishing enough. Astonishing beyond hope is the commitment to reality, the developed vision, that this mastery serves." — Vijay Seshadri

“No Other Gods is the carefully orchestrated, richly fashioned, thoroughly enjoyable collection of a poet coming into the full exercise of his powers.” — Eamon Grennan

Crows in Eden

(Salmon Poetry, 2022)

"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

"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

“A powerful, scorching dramatic poem.” — David Lynn

FICTION

DO GEESE SEE GOD

(Neutral Zones Press, 2021)

“With its forceful, elegant prose and unblinking honesty, Todd Hearon’s DO GEESE SEE GOD reminded me on every page of the work of Dennis Lehane and Cormac McCarthy, two writers I greatly admire. The characters here, utterly original and deftly if lightly interlaced, wander the bright halls of love and connection, and plumb the dark depths of religious fanaticism, troubled sexuality, and violence. There are disturbing scenes in abundance, but Hearon always stops short of despair and the gratuitous; always there is a mystical twinkling, a magical turn of phrase, a splash of poetry, a glimmer of hope, a redemptive moment. I enjoyed every word.”— Roland Merullo , author of 24 books, including Breakfast with Buddha and The Revere Beach Trilogy

“The best portal to DO GEESE SEE GOD is a map of surrender: no signposts, no boundaries, only the glorious invitation to fall and believe and be. Allow the pieces of this fractured family saga to sing to you. These are the voices of siblings and parents, of minders and ghosts, and within this dark vortex are the everyday fierce desires and laments we all know—a story that will move you in ways you won’t expect. In weaving this gorgeously written tornado, Todd Hearon has created an epic that lingers in the secret corners of our complicated hearts.”— Anne Sanow, author of Triple Time

“Todd Hearon’s DO GEESE SEE GOD is wild, ferocious, vulnerable—a deep song that beautifully captures loss and loneliness with hilarity and precision. Read it for its big-hearted characters; read it for the voice that embraces you, speaks to you, and takes you in. A wonderful debut.”— Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters, Once the Shore and The Mountain