Behemoth

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 identityincluding those associated with race, nation, and religionbecome most prone to unmindful projection, fears and vulnerabilities and our subsequent potential for cruelty and exclusion. Central to the books inquiry is the legacy of the holocaust as something that persists, recognized or nota critical element of cultural memory that both eludes our language and summons our need to speak.