Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond

Therapon

by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond

$21.95

 

 

Format: Paperback
Published: December 2023

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ISBN: 978-1-946482-99-0 Categories: , , ,

“Therapon is an exquisitely composed collaboration between Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond, a continuous thread of 12-13 line poems that defy any attempt at knowing who wrote what. Therapon is a journey, a song, a looping narrative, an exploration into spirit and word, and it exposes all our failures to find peace and redemption. Etymologically, ‘therapon’ means ‘chamber’ in Ancient Greek. It also means a person whose job/role is an attendant, a companion of lower rank, an aid, a slave, a servant who has committed (or was committed) to be willing to sacrifice all for a human master or supernatural deity. One thinks of The Iliad, one thinks of the global history of slavery, and one thinks of how horribly religion and dogma have failed us, and how fiercely the yearning for a spiritual life lives on. One thinks of how ‘therapy’ derives, also, from the roots of ‘therapon,’ and then one becomes very sad, and a bit bemused. Therapon is also an examination of how language is inadequate to the human and the human spirit. A mature, serious work, Therapon reminds us that humans are beasts capable of immense violence. Why can’t we evolve? And yet, like the animals, we also love, we also seek.”

—Gillian Conoley

“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

In Therapon poets Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick engage in a dialogue of near-sonnets, 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.

Bruce Bond is the author of thirty books, most recently Scar (Etruscan Press, 2020), T**he Calling (Parlor Press, 2021), Behemoth (Encounter Books, 2021), winner of the New Criterion Prize, and Patmos (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), winner of the Juniper Prize. His other books include Words Written Against the Walls of the City (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Dear Reader (Parlor Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press, 2018), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize; Elixir Press, 2018), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award; LSU, 2017), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith & Crab Orchard Awards; Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), and Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize; University of Tampa Press, 2016). His work has appeared in seven editions of The Best American Poetry. He is Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Arrows (Tupelo Press, 2020) and new translations of Sappho, Wind—Mountain—Oak (Tupelo Press, 2023), and ancient Greek lyric poetry, Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions, 2020). His other poetry collections include gentlessness (Tupelo, 2015); North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); and Circle’s Apprentice (2011). He is also the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Additional information

Weight 0.33 lbs
Dimensions 5 × 7 in

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