BOOKS
Praise for Divining Bones
Where divination meets poetry in extraordinary fashion! After awhile you can look to this book for answers, opening and closing it nine times with a question in mind, the poet Charlie Bondhus leading the way. Magic spells and paranormal experiences abound among beautifully written lines by a poet we will all want to share and know. I love this book!
CA Conrad
This book explores the spaces between things, pagan & Christian, gay & queer, tooth & tongue, pestle & mortar, fairytale & the real. The poems themselves are forms of resistance, spells that only work if you know how to ask for them. If there’s an underbelly to American poetry demanding to be scratched and salved, then come—meet me at the edge of these strange woods.
Timothy Liu
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Come take a ride in the dazzling maw of Baba Yaga’s carriage; funny and grisly, a very entertaining meditation on life in a body.
Judy Grahn
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Praise for All the Heat We Could Carry
All The Heat We Could Carry is a rare, brilliant and necessary book...our wars come home in these poems, through a prophet who’s seen hell, who now lives in the aftermath where all is refracted through the searing lens of wounded memory... these poems move with precision from war to home and back, from stun grenade, body bag and bone saw to a garden in winter...Bondhus is a true poet, and this is among the best books I have read in a very long time.
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Carolyn Forché
I don't have words to praise enough the words I read here. This is a gay man writing about war and peace. But more significantly --- this is the soaring achievement of an extraordinarily gifted poet with an extraordinary theme and an extraordinary heart.
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Anne Rice
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This collection, at turns intimate, at turns troubled by all that war is, gives us what we admire most in the poems that call to us again and again: a complicated look at what we've been trained to look away from. These poems enlarge what the reader will understand masculinity can embody, and tell a tale of the way we all resist ruin and come to be shaped by it in inexplicable ways.
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Reginald Dwayne Betts
Praise for How the Boy Might See It
Through humor and heartache these poems mine the glories and perils of modern sexuality. How the Boy Might See It serves as testament to both the splendor and simplicity of our human search for tenderness and touch, a sweet Whitmanic hymn to the way the universe expands as each young life discovers the relish of the forbidden. Reading these poems we are reconnected to our fumbling flesh and reminded that a type of salvation is available to us from an embodied surrender to wonder and delight.
Dan Vera
These poems imprint the reader with the invisible, leaving us forever changed by “the heavy business of marking the world.”
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Dean Kostos
