Bruce Bond’s new collection, Words Written Against the Walls of the City, confronts problems of collectivity and individual freedom in ways that bring the historical into conjunction with the personal details of everyday lives. This luminous work approaches cities, real and symbolic, as both metaphors for and embodiments of the social self, inescapably embedded in a contemporary world and yet removed, summoned by the same technical connectivity that conspires to pull us further apart, one from another. In the end, Bond’s assured verse reveals how a sense of some communal whole inspires its share of indebtedness and awe in an individual’s efforts to navigate the environments that enfold us.