Bruce Bond’s trilogy of sonnet sequences explores trauma and self-alienation and the power of imaginative life to heal―to reawaken with the past; to better understand its influence, both conscious and unconscious; to gain some measure of clarity, empathy, and freedom as we read the world around us. Bruce Bond’s Scar is full of scars, yes, on wrists and brows and arms, but full, too, of questions, each punctuated with a period rather than a question mark. “Who are we deceiving.” “Is the knife still there.” “How many fingers. What’s your name.” “Is it the same with you.” “Why is it gods always talk in echoes, / if at all, their words buried in words.” Bond’s book echoes, too. With the words of the gods buried in its words, how could it not. ― H. L. Hix Bruce Bond’s exquisite new collection, Scar , opens in a Terezin haze, set after the slice of war, where the instruments of the dead seem to signal a traceable echo back to old traumas. Dantean, a book of dark woods, Scar studies how we cast our inner wound onto outer worlds, where “every home is the one I lost to fire,” and it follows the echo to its source, to Hell and the long climb upward through the canal of the ear, as it were, in this collection that leaps with such deftness between memory and myth. The title poem, a meditation on scars and scarring, sustains breathtaking attention on the war-destroyed uncle, and the cutter, and the self being born “through a tear/in the fabric” of the world. These unrhymed sonnets, as if one whole note struck repeatedly from beginning to finish, are technically superb, but the genius of Scar is its faithful translation of an ache. I know no other poet writing today whose capacity of perception is so sensitive to the harmonies of language and truth, sphere music composed by the difficult, nearly impossible, work of listening closely and hearing what is real. ―David Keplinger, Another City Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently,  Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015),  Black Anthem  (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016),  Gold Bee  (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016),  Sacrum  (Four Way Books, 2017),  Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017),  Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods  (Elixir Poetry Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (2018) and  Dear Reader  (Free Verse Editions, 2018). Five books are forthcoming, including the critical book Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave). Other honors include the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Award, River Styx International Poetry Award, Laurence Goldstein Poetry Award, the Allen Tate Award, the Natalie Ornish Best Book of Poetry Prize, the Colladay Award, the Richard Peterson Prize, the Knightville Poetry Award, the New South Poetry Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the Texas Institute for the Arts. At UNT, he has received the Kesterson Award for Graduate Teaching, the Toulouse Scholars Award, and the UNT Foundation's inaugural Eminent Faculty Award. The Lost Language If you are searching for a friend online, an insomniac to break the bread of misery and silence, look no farther. Trust me, says anonymous, the voice in rivers after dark is no illusion. It is an angel. And who can resist. If I am broken just enough, I fly. I suspend my physical heart, alive, among the saints and champion banners. I never met an angel, but I saw one once in a painting, in one hand poppies, the other a harp, and though it made no music, it seemed so finely strung in the fire of a child’s hair, it nearly played itself. The Lost Language When I want a thing, I put a little music in my voice. It comes by instinct, the hunger in the song before it is sung, and so, I imagine, it never goes away. A new language comes out of no one person or place and a little of the all. When I think of my father I think of words turning into water. I think therefore I stream his music in my head. My measure of him phrased, desired, mourned. Hard to resurrect the world without a world left out, to make our losses sing. Where there is one, there must be two. I too am scared. Paradise is lonely. Scar 2 Today I catch sight of the scar my student pulls the cuff of her sleeve to conceal, and she answers a look I did not know I gave her. I was, she tells me, working through some issues, and she hands me a poem. I’m so sorry, I say, in proxy for a mystery. I want to say more. Then less. I am pulling at a sleeve of my own. It’s fine, she says. Writing helps, and so I read, I cut. I question. How deep is too deep. I do not know. Is the knife still there. Does it move as the eye moves, asleep, the page gone dark, the lid in shivers. Asking to be raised. Narissus in the Underworld 26 The creak of boats in swells of the harbor sounds a warning like hinges of a