Behemoth

(Hardback)

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In the poetry collection Behemoth, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysical imagination, both in its secular and sacred forms, as something universal, endemic to consciousness, embedded in our longing to capture a lost past and stave off anxieties about the great forgetting to come. As such the book figures as both a critique and empathetic analysis of idolatry, broadly understood and equally universal, problematic as a failed strategy intent upon possession, at odds with values embedded in its symbols. Figures critical to our identity-including those associated with race, nation, and religion-become most prone to unmindful projection, fears and vulnerabilities and our subsequent potential for cruelty and exclusion. Central to the book's inquiry is the legacy of the holocaust as something that persists, recognized or not-a critical element of cultural memory that both eludes our language and summons our need to speak.

Reviews

"Bruce Bonds new book Behemoth nourishes a purgatorial fire: the fire-in-the-head of imagination, the crematoriums fire, the refiners 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 thatwith great tenderness and nuanceexamines 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

Author Bio

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), Frankensteins 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).