Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-one 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), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.
Nonfiction
May/June 2017
Reclamations of the Marvelous
When my neighbors complained the roots of our cypress were buckling their lot, the landlord cut the tree down. I didn’t know a living thing three stories high could be so […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2016
Turing
With every wind, a chirping in the bladed vent. And I knew it was a dead thing as I knew each wind as none if wind alone, and so I […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2016
Wings
The movies have fallen in love with the machine again, with the voice of the telephone inside the phone, the ghost that would be dead and alive and ours to […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2016
The Birth of the X-ray
It might as well be bone, this wedding ring. The way it haloes the finger, white on white, that belonged to the wife of the inventor. Or should I say […]
Nonfiction
Jan/Feb 2015
Zeno’s Arrow, Cupid’s Bow: Structure, Process, and Poetry’s Dream of the Unified Field
It’s easy to be mysterious about mystery. The difficult thing, the beautiful thing, is to be clear about mystery. —B.H. Fairchild Reason loves a good paradox, tight as it is […]
Nonfiction
Fall 2014
Mercury’s Passage: Poetry, Fracture, and the Talking Cure
And he still hawks poems like news, as welcome in heaven as in hell. —Austin Hummell, “Mercury” Mercury walks, if he walks, in either world, the highest and the lowest. […]
Nonfiction
Fall 2012
Authenticity and the Myth of the Lyric Subject: The Summons of Olson’s Legacy
Ever since 1950, when in his essay “Projective Verse” Charles Olson framed his summons to the ideals of a more spontaneous though no less formally conscious aesthetic, the notion of […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1990
An Abundance of Lack: The Fullness of Desire in the Poetry of Robert Hass
Often enough, when a thing is seen clearly, there is a sense of absence about it—it is true of impressionist painting—as if, the more palpable it is, the more some […]
Summer 2013
The Invention of the Cry Track
Long after the laugh track, it seemed
only rational, practical: this new thing.
Winter 2013
Ginsberg; Schopenhauer; Whitman
Ginsberg
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.
Pity the man who spits on the mirror
to make it shine. I am talking to you,
world, the face I gave you a monster,
my shame a little circle I plunged into.