Sign & Breath is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voice? Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, a...

With its finely honed language and interweaving of free-verse couplets, poet and musician Bruce Bond has returned us to the world of structure and form as the framework for this profound exploration of dissonance in music, in art, in our lives and its underlying power to restore meaning and hope in a chaotic world.

In Invention of the Wilderness, Bruce Bond explores the wilderness as a spiritual, psychological, and ecological realm—a territory that, depending on our tolerances and affections, calls out for order, exploitation, expansion, or preservation. Although to talk of “inventing” the wilderness seems paradoxical, the book seeks to reclaim the etymological root of “invention” as a “venturing in.” To invent a wilderness is to go inward by way of attentive engagement in the natural world,...

The clock is ticking and before you know, it will be September! Use our popular study guides Passing the Numeracy Skills Test and Passing the Literacy Skills Test to get those pesky skills tests done and dusted asap. This fifth edition includes a full practice test, more practice questions and more question and answer commentary. Also included is more guidance on grammar, punctuation and spelling practice for the test.You’ll be more confident

Bruce Bond’s new book of poetry, The Plural of Water, offers a trilogy of sequences that explore the relation of the unconscious—our denials, affinities, passions, and self-divisions—to our ability to perceive and negotiate the crises of our contemporary moment. Through a series of lyrics, both personal and historical, the book’s sections constitute parts of an integrated whole that seeks a deeper understanding of the psychological roots of ethics: traumatic fracture, ecological h...

2022 Test Site Poetry Prize winnerIn poems both personal and historical, The Dove of the Morning News explores conceptions of collectivity, inflected by each psyche, as a force of both connection and division. In its look at tribalism and systemic cruelty as rooted in shame, dread, and insecurity, the book seeks a better understanding of how power needs, spurred by communities of hatred, weaponize the brain’s tendencies to think in animated figure...

The Winter 2022-23 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporaryAmerican literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in avariety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton amongminnows.”The Winter 2022-23 Issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selvesHonest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voi...

The dead are never far from the living in Patmos, the end is always nigh, and the cultural symptoms of denial and reconciliation, unresolved shame and loneliness, remain just beneath the surface: "It is how, these many / years, we survived. In our rooms, alone, at the end of time." In this book-length poetic sequence, Bruce Bond explores the psychology of endings as a living presence that haunts our spiritual, moral, and ecological imaginations, elevates its summons, and draws us ...

Plurality and the Poetics of Self investigates the words “I” and “self” as suggestive of eight territories of meaning. Via poetry’s lens into language and its limits, Bruce Bond explores the notion of self as identity, volitional agent, ego, existential monad, subjectivity, ontological origin, soul, and transpersonal psyche. Taking poetic meaning as our common currency, the book emphasizes the critical role of the un-representable and how embattled and confused assumptions threate...

In these essays, Bruce Bond interrogates the commonly accepted notion that all poetry since modernism tends toward one of two traditions: that of a more architectural sensibility with its resistance to metaphysics, and that of a latter-day Romantic sensibility, which finds its authority in a metaphysics authenticated by the individual imagination. Poetry, whether self-consciously or not, has always thrived on the paradox of the distant in the immanent and the other in the self; as such, it...

Blackout Starlight brings together a selection of poems from nine previously published books, along with a generous assortment of new work. At the heart of this collection are investigations of the role of eros, language, and creative life, and of the wonder and anxiety of their absence. In Bond’s telling, the lines between real and unreal, living and dead, blur together in the poet’s imagination, casting an equally compassionate eye upon “the man we see writhing in the marble” of an uncar...