Book of poems, including a long section titled: The Silent Conversation. A selection of other poem titles are: Gallery of Inanimate Objects, The Butterfly Effect, The Facebook Elegies, and Snow Burial. 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 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 (U of NV, 2024), plus two books of criticism, Immanent Distance (UMI, 2015) and Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019). His honors include the Juniper Prize, Richard Snyder Award, Test Site Poetry Award, New Criterion Poetry Award, Nicholas Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Crab Orchard Book Prize, Wishing Jewel Editor's Award, Elixir Press Poetry Award, Tampa Review Book Prize, Lynda Hull Award,  James Dickey Prize, Laurence Lieberman Prize, 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. The Silent Conversation The creek that splits our local park thins to near stillness in its season, a poverty that sharpens the line of the light it bears, as silence sharpens the edge of speech, words the work no will can quite express. When music breathes, it dies a little. It aches. Resolves. And no sooner the impoverishments of breathing river into song. They are its source. The surge and gravity that break this earth in two and give to it. A voice.