Behemoth

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-six books, including, most recently, Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, siu Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997– 2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, lsu, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Dear Reader (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (lsu, 2019).

"Bruce Bond’s new book Behemoth nourishes a purgatorial fire: the fire-in-the-head of imagination, the crematorium’s fire, the refiner’s fire, the fire of the phoenix. In a time of social isolation, this book emphasizes the alternative transubstantiation, the “open heart” provided by basic human sympathy and “the Eucharist of imagined life.”—Karl Kirchwey"'I like my testament battered, abused,/ scored with a dozen questions in the margins,’ writes Bruce Bond in the title poem of Behemoth, a book that—with great tenderness and nuance—examines faith (and its loss), genocide, and the riven state of our nation. Throughout the collection, the speaker of these moving poems pushes against cruelty, calls on us to engage in empathy, asks us to recognize how even the landscape is transformed by the traumas it has witnessed. 'Let me begin again,’ Bond keeps repeating, because ultimately Behemoth hopes we may find our way back to a place of understanding and, perhaps, even to a world of shared song.”—Jehanne Dubrow