Books by Bruce Bond

In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world-the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts. In light of an imagined listener and the world taken as a whole, Bond sees the summons of the self in the other, and in the way the other in the self informs our sacrifices and reckoning, our speechless hesitations, our jokes and our rituals of loss. Every moment of personal and political life, interpretation holds the page of the human face, not far but far enough, and all the while, beneath our gaze, the subtext that is no text at all, where the old argument between universals and particulars breaks down, exhausted, and the real in the imagined is, by necessity, renewed.What People Are SayingDear Reader is that essential intimate epistle that comes to us in an hour of great need. It offers no answers but rather reminds us of our fundamental questions. Meticulous and measured, richly working a system of resonant recurring tropes, this sequence of sonnets give us the voice of one particular sensibility-in turns tender, earnest, honest, intelligent, witty, and wry-as it reaches out across a divide it knows cannot be crossed by language and reason alone. In a time when we confront daily the frenetic, desensitizing maelstrom of political rhetoric and a ubiquitous flood of mass media, Bruce Bond reminds us in Dear Reader of the quiet but urgent philosophical and spiritual inquiries, sometimes monstrous and animal, that define and affirm our humanity. -Kathleen GraberBruce Bond's powerful book-length poem Dear Reader arrives with the "shush of oceans, page after page," buoying forward a meditation on how we read and how we are read by others. Each reader is a choir, a city, a book "the world leafs through." Bond reckons with "inner lives / so enormous I could barely see them," chronicling the longing, cruelty, and generosity those encounters elicit. And he recognizes how one's own inner life casts a ghost-face "across the glass between us." Composed of fifty blank-verse sonnets, the book is stunning in its range and quickness, urgent and penetrating in confronting the "call of freedoms other than our own" that remain achingly near and impossibly far away. -Corey MarksAbout the AuthorBruce Bond is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017). Four books are forthcoming. Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.

Brings together a selection of poems from nine previously published books, along with a generous assortment of new work. At the heart of this collection are investigations of the role of eros, language, and creative life, and of the wonder and anxiety of their absence.

Delves deeply into the human relationship with the divine and its capacity for empathy, transformation, and the tolerance of difference and doubt. Bruce Bond seeks neither to praise nor to attack institutional religions, instead choosing to explore their interactions with the inner lives of those who hold them sacred.

In The Visible, we enter into a surreal landscape "where it is neither day nor night / but both at once," where light becomes an imaginative force that both illuminates and obscures. The illegible draws us closer to the page-the visible revealed, paradoxically, by what we cannot see. Though these formally restrained poems possess an abstract and introspective intensity, Bond grounds them in the everyday. Both vivid and speculative, the chiseled lyrics breathe. In "My Mother's Closet," the pages of medical books become holy and horrendous, "soiled at the corners, the mind's / terrific passages shocked with highlight, / glossed with scratches in a mother's hand."

In his newest collection, Bruce Bond transforms the known and the familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, he complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time.

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