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.
About the Author: 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).
