— A Wishing Jewel Editor’s Selection for Poetic Innovation—

In Lunette, poet Bruce Bond and photographer Walter Cochran-Bond explore brokenness—culturally, physically, and psychologically—as a summons, a plea for greater outreach and self-understanding. In dialogue across an intimate distance, poems and photographs deepen their engagement as independent sources, enlarging conversation through forms of interrogation as opposed to mere translation or description. As a figure of fragmentation, intrinsic to both vitality and crisis, the lunette voices what it, in turn, would question, be it openness or exclusion, recovery or loss, trauma or the ache of the phantom wound. 

Praise for Lunette

With a lunette, there isn’t a center. No completion. These two talented brothers use word and image to vividly direct us toward the evidence of absence. Unexpected angles, “abandoned / and abused, half-eaten here and there,” expose new perspectives as we move from one bold fragment to the next. In the mist and aloneness, we travel sinuous existence and history, being welcomed “to the only life.”

—Lauren Camp, Poet Laureate of New Mexico

Lunette is a breathtaking and breath-giving conversation between a poet and photographer, brothers haunted by the lunette as both an architectural curvature and hollow, and a word, taught by their father, signifying a protection spell whispered into the darkness of a formless void. To “make grief an object”; to honor the memory of a mother whose presence, like language, offers a stay against primal wounds and fears; and to “think in affinities” where once was strangeness and silence, this book carves a dialogic space into the mysteries of music, childhood, death, and dreams, inscribing the desire of a speaker who listens as anonymous cipher: “Truth is, I long to hear your voice.” A lyric exchange of liminal beauty, pathos, and “quiet danger,” this delineation of another face, another voice, at the “grave of starlight," is a revelation.  

—Virginia Konchan, author of Bel Canto

• a sample from Lunette