Bruce Bond is the author of thirty books including, most recently, Behemoth, The Calling, and Patmos. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry. He is the Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Praise for For the Lost Cathedral

“In this new political climate, Bond’s recently published For the Lost Cathedral anticipates its own relevance. . . . For the Lost Cathedral is not unusual for looking at cruelty and destruction so intently; what distinguishes it is that in poem after poem we are vividly recalled to the fact that what has been destroyed was once given to flourish.”—Interim

“The capaciousness of Bond’s vision—coupled with the graceful, legato fluidity of his measured lines—resists convenient assurances of eternal truth, just as it questions the historical failures of organized religion. . . .For the Lost Cathedral may very well be the best poetry collection from 2015 you’ve yet to read. Bruce Bond may very well be the most gifted lyric poet writing in America today.”—Plume

“We begin ‘When first I came into the world’—line of basic condition, primary crisis, that reminds us of what is so easily forgotten, that one is born into the day, borne into the world, and bodily existence begins that double-life of mind, conscious of the secret of faith by being so struck by consciousness of doubt. Bruce Bond, in poems remarkable for obliterating the opposition between ferocity and fragility, knows what he shows: that we must construct the house in which our spirit dwells, line by line, brick by brick, we must invite the ‘secret life’ in so that it might come to some use. It is daily work, a kind of practice, and a strange one—the thing we build to ask it our questions: ‘What, in the end, is the use of use.’ Whatever it is, it is not obvious. Some prayer not wholly prayer, some poem that is the made-thing, whose words can be heard only by the fact of the prayer being spoken, the poem being written. These poems stand as a primary document of our ongoing condition: we are in the world, and we must provide for ourselves our gifts, our guides, must write down doubt to find the outline of faith, must speak the secret to keep it safe.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Circle’s Apprentice

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