Therapon

In Therapon poets Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick engage in a dialogue of near-sonnets, 13-lined investigations, both personal and cultural, that explore the unfinished, haunted, and unrepresentable nature of selfhood as best suggested and enlarged in gestures of exchange. Inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this book interrogates not only our ethical relation to others as beyond the pretense of our grasp, but also the notion that otherness inhabits each of us, however individuated and misunderstood, and makes our language possible, unstable, and inexhaustibly resourceful. In this way Therapon finds in dialogue not only its medium but its fascination, a sense of setting forth in friendship, and in friendship the mercies of the strange. "This maze of poem we are led through-or not led, encouraged through-offers many threads to follow: 'one day a needle drags a filament / that in time dissolves like a sun on its passage.' That two authors can so coordinate their views of a world as to produce such lovely lyricism is itself a wonder, but that the resulting vision becomes, as binocular viewing always engenders, both multi-dimensional and convincing, is a continual gift continually opening before us. More than therapeutic, the book is a delight and a discovery." - Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth