Books by Bruce Bond

In a unique collaboration, The Other Sky presents a dialogue between poet and painter. Bruce Bond's poems probe and respond to the haunting and mysterious paintings of Aron Wiesenfeld. By virtue of the power and refinement of the images and poems, The Other Sky creates a symbiosis larger than either medium alone.

I cannot sing my way into your child's
suffering. I try. And the music of trying

goes speechless in the woods between us.
Let me try again. Once there was a girl

who climbed a tree to end her misery
to hang among the branches like a bell.

Bruce Bond is the author of nine poetry books.

Aron Wiesenfeld's drawings and paintings have appeared in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

Choir of the Wells is a tetralogy of new books that cohere as an exploration of the mind-body enigma.

Light, we know, is an invisible thing.
The beam that falls through the theaters
of a childhood— we trust it’s there

thanks only to the dust that floats inside it,
and the screen, of course, the stuff that takes
the dark of light and makes of it a story.

Bruce Bond is the author of eight previous books of poetry. He is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and poetry editor for American Literary Review.

“The poems in Bruce Bond's new collection Peal probe music's deepest sources. These beautifully crafted lyrics lead us down into intricate and sonoruous paths where we meet out own uncertain songs, at once ghostly, elegiac, and ecstatic. This is a work of exquisite complexity by one of our best poets writing today.”—Molly Bendall

“The speculative drive of these poems pushes the reader to the very limits of reflection.”—Daniel Tiffany

“Poets have ever sought a seamless integration of art and life: think of Keats's 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' or Yeats's 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' In Bruce Bond's Peal, as in the work of this best predecessors, 'it is impossible to know/where music ends, the world begins.'”—H.L. Hix

In Bruce Bond's seventh book, we see a sustained exploration of mortality and its embodiment in the consolations of beauty, most notably in music.

As if even the respite of song is action,
its silence no less. Even the bend and reach
of architecture that rises out of the smolder
and back, even the legs of the arc that return
the way the sun returns to a black well,
its trespass quiet, slow, a ghost, a coin,
a wish gone deep as the day grows old.

Bruce Bond teaches at the University of North Texas and is poetry editor for American Literary Review.

“With the luminous precision of music, Bruce Bond has crafted, in Cinder, a generous and urgent collection of poems, a work that celebrates the human condition and terrifies us with it in equal measure. The result is a book of poems weighted with dark vision, set loose. Bruce Bond is one of our generation’s best poets, and this is his best book.”—Laura Kasischke