Ordinary Monsters

All of the new thinking is about loss, Robert Hass once wrote. In that, it resembles all of the old thinking. Gay poet Justin Bond’s gorgeous debut collection pays beautiful, painful homage to this human tradition. These pages steep the reader in passion and grief, stark and gleaming. They nourish us with lust, lyricism and the will to go on, which is, as Bond says, part of what elevates us above a clumsy gallop of meat and bone. –Ruth L. Schwartz, winner of the National Poetry Series prize, Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, Anhinga Prize for Poetry, AWP Award Series prize.

The story of us, writes Justin Bond, is the story of America. The smart, insightful, and revelatory poems of Ordinary Monsters are themselves stories of us (both reader and writer) but also of this vast and bizarre country. And like our country, Bond’s poems are diverse, ambitious, and explosive. Walt Whitman would love their big, expansive, democratic heart. You will too.–Dean Rader, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2010 Writer’s League of Texas Poetry Prize, and the George H. Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America