Patmos

Bruce Bond's book-length sequence of poems takes up the visions of John of Patmos, the Book of Revelation's horrors and glories, as a way into how people carry the idea of an ending. Here the end is not a distant event but a presence already at work, shaping spiritual, moral, and ecological thinking and pressing the reader to ask what that presence means.

Beneath these concerns lie the quieter afflictions of a culture: denial and the labor of reconciliation, shame left unresolved, and loneliness. The poems read Revelation as a view onto a deep injury, a crisis of values, and a longing to repair a kind of visionary damage that is solitary at its core yet thoroughly present-day. The dead stay close to the living throughout, and the poems press against a barrier that refuses to give way.