Bond, Bruce 1954–

PERSONAL: Born June 25, 1954, in Pasadena, CA; son of George and Winifred Bond; married Nicki Cohen. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Pomona College, B.A.; Claremont Graduate School, M.A. (English), 1977; University of Denver, M.A. (music performance), 1982, Ph.D., 1987.

ADDRESSES: Home—Denton, TX. Office—Department of English, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-1307. E-mail—bond@unt.edu.

CAREER: University of North Texas, Denton, director of creative writing, 1995–, professor of English, 2001–. Jung Foundation, member.

MEMBER: Associated Writing Programs.

AWARDS, HONORS: Robert Gross Award, 1990, for Independence Days; Colladay Award, 1991, for The Anteroom of Paradise; winner, Gerard Cable Poetry Chapbook Competition, 1993; Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, Texas Institute of Letters, 1998, for Radiography; fellow, Texas Commission on the Arts, 1998, and National Endowment for the Arts, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Independence Days (poetry), Bob Woodley Memorial Press (Topeka, KS), 1990.

The Anteroom of Paradise (poetry), Quarterly Review of Literature (Princeton, NJ), 1991.

The Possible: Poems, Silverfish Review Press (Eugene, OR), 1995.

Radiography (poetry), BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 1997.

The Throats of Narcissus (poetry), University of Arkansas Press (Fayetteville, AK), 2001.

Cinder (poetry), Etruscan Press (Silver Spring, MD), 2003.

Contributor of poetry and essays to periodicals, including Paris Review, New Republic, Georgia Review, Yale Review, Best American Poetry and Threepenny Review. Poetry editor, American Literary Review, 1995.

SIDELIGHTS: Bruce Bond is a poet whose words, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "luminesce like bones in an X-ray." The collection Radiography contains, according to Tom Mayo in the Dallas Morning News, "pages [that] shimmer." Bond "reinvents as he re-creates, in language that is crisp and vivid," concluded Mayo.

Bond once told CA: "I have always been attracted to poems that listen as they speak, poems with an intensity that comes from a heightened vigilance, a speed of as-sociation, a soulful engagement in its chosen world, and a generosity of resonance. At a time when so much work suffers from an enervation of meaning either by way of too much unspoken or too little, I am attracted to work which achieves its evocative shimmer, its sense of multiplicity, urgency, and dynamism, from a memorable music and a rich layering of correspondences. Such work is particularly marvelous when it is deeply saturated in the unconscious, when it allows for more than mere reportage or thoughtless fragmentation, when it favors the transfiguration of experience into something sculpted and essential, something surprisingly luminous—even disturbing—as if new and necessary being had somehow been brought into the world. In such poems, it seems that language is determining itself at times, that it holds the torch, deepening our investments, opening up our range of thought and feeling, our sense of who we are and what we may become."