The Silent Conversation
Bruce Bond

Published by Cloudbank Books, The Silent Conversation is the Editor’s Choice for the Vern Rutsala Book Prize for 2024. “In The Silent Conversation, Bruce Bond practices what is sometimes called sacred listening  . . . ”—Teresa Cader, author of AT RISK

More Praise for The Silent Conversation

An elegy for Robin Williams. The resuming of an unfinished conversation, began years prior. An ode to a Facebook friend’s posting habits. Realizations about childhood reignited. In Silent Conversation, Bruce Bond deepens and expands our notions of intimacy and silence across time, space, and technology in poems as philosophical as they are grounded in the realest worlds. This is a poet whose perspective both roams and rests in profound measure–reading this collection was like seeing an old friend and remembering, through listening to them, of one’s individual and collective aliveness.

—Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam

 [The author’s] musical ear, compassionate attention, and astute eye for detail hold childhood shame and abuse—his and ours—to the light of recognition, the precursor of healing. With laser vision, he scans our adult world, noting “there’s always a child hiding in plain sight.” The long stunning title sequence meditates on a friend’s suicide: “To die of guilt is rare. But shame, shame we speak so little of // it takes all our strength to hold it.” It is the great gift of these exquisite lyrics that Bond offers no easy solutions: listening and speaking create small openings for healing. “When a wound heals, it turns harder, darker. / And then, in time, it scars.  It whitens. It writes.” 

Bond’s range here includes more “public” poems, where his personal journey intersects with Auden, the atrocities of WWII, and the ever-present making of dictators. The Silent Conversation is wise and fire-forged, a book to be read again and again.

—Teresa Cader, author of AT RISK

About Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is the author of 37 books including, most recently, Patmos (UMass, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner, 2022), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023), Therapon (with Dan Beachy-Quick, Tupelo, 2023), Vault (Ashland, 2023), Lunette (Green Linden, 2024), and The Dove of the Morning News (University of Nevada, 2024). His honors include the Verse Daily Book Prize, two TIL Best Book of Poetry awards, fellowships from the NEA and the Texas Institute for the Arts, and seven appearances in Best American Poetry. Presently he teaches part-time as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs jazz and classical guitar in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

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