Reviewed by Victoria Xie
Therapon
by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond
Tupelo Press
November 2023, 82 pages, ISBN-13 : 978-1946482990
In Therapon, Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond undertake a sustained poetic dialogue that is at once formally restrained and conceptually expansive. Composed of sequences of near-sonnets—thirteen-line forms that gesture toward closure but refuse to resolve—the book unfolds as an extended dialogue, each poem answering, refracting, or unsettling the one beside it. What emerges is not simply collaboration, but a transformative mode of relation: a poetics grounded in exchange, where the self is neither prior to nor independent from the other, but continuously shaped in the very act of poetic exchange.
The title denotes the first insight to this structure. In ancient Greek, therapon (θεράπων) denotes a companion, attendant, or ritual double—like Patroclus to Achilles in Iliad, who stands and fights beside him, sometimes even bearing the fate of his companion. The term carries with it a sense of fidelity without sameness, and such is the relation the book stages: Beachy-Quick and Bond do not merge voices; rather, they inhabit a shared field, a sort of therapy—symbolically adopted in the collection as a term that shares etymological roots with therapon—in which each voice becomes legible only through the presence of the other. In this sense, a poem is not a mere mental wander but an interactive site: a space where relation happens, evolves.
From the outset, identity appears as products of effect. In poem 2:, I, Dan writes:
I was no one and then my shadow
followed names, names they fell into the mouths
of those I loved
[…] I
named a beast and in that moment a herd arrived
Here the self emerges within language through a process of naming that is already social, already dispersed. To name is not to fix but to proliferate. The “beast” does not maintain a singular form but multiplies into a “herd,” suggesting that language generates excess rather than containment. Identity, in this framework, becomes something that occurs in the movement between voices, between words.
Yet if language enables the emergence of the self, it also destabilizes it, producing forms of knowledge that feel precise but remain fundamentally constructed. Poem :1, II stages this tension with striking clarity:
The philosopher sat inside his own shadow.
He said justice is a perfect cube. In the world
Nowhere, not among pinecones or pinwheels,
Is such a cube. You must draw it. Here’s a cave wall.
The gesture toward Aristotle’s formulation of justice as a perfect form—complete, symmetrical, self-contained—is immediately undone. Bond argues that “perfect cube” does not exist in the world prior to human existence; it must be drawn, projected, imagined. In this sense, knowledge is revealed as something shaped through mental abstraction rather than an actual encounter with the absolute. The staccato statement “Here’s a cave wall.” further complicates this process, recalling Plato’s allegory in which perception itself becomes mediated and potentially deceptive. What is taken to be reality may in fact be only its shadow, a reflection of truth, the ideal world which humans never really step into.
This concern runs throughout Therapon, where language repeatedly reveals itself as both the condition of knowledge and its limitation, serving, as Conoley commented, “an examination of how language is inadequate to the human and the human spirit.” When the poets write, “so I named the flower bee the bee flame,” instead of establishing meaning, language confronts its very essence, transforming one thing into another through a chain of associations that can be constantly modified.
Such moments complicate any attempt to maintain a clear distinction between self and Other, and drawing attention repetitively to Levinas, with whom the collection begins. If, for Levinas, the Other exists prior to language and cannot be reduced to it, Therapon suggests that the very attempt to approach the Other is always indirect and inevitably distorted by language. There is no access to alterity outside of this system, no pure encounter untouched by naming, metaphor, or translation. What reveals is not the failure of relation, but its condition: a space in which understanding is always partial, provisional, and subject to revision.
However, Therapon does more than merely sustaining this framework. Instead, it tests it, bends it, and at times quietly resists it. Where Levinas insists on the absolute exteriority of the Other, the poems repeatedly suggest a more entangled condition: the Other not as wholly beyond, but as already within. This entanglement becomes most visible in the book’s recurring engagement with religious imagery. Lexicons such as Eden, salvation, and divine law appear strikingly as sites of displacement. One sequence offers:
Eden is only some letters buried in a pasture,
Grass obedient to an inner law
Also commanding us, water inside a bone
No one can drink.
Eden, traditionally understood as a pre-linguistic origin, turns to “only some letters in a pasture”, a sphere that is simultaneously physical and linguistic. Hence the supposed ground of truth is already mediated, already inaccessible except through signs that fail to deliver it. The “inner law” that governs both nature and subject appears equally ambiguous: present, perhaps, but neither fully knowable, nor fully inhabitable.
A similar destabilization occurs around the notion of salvation:
in every canto of the word
saved I heard not angels but the monster
What is revealed in this seeming demonization of the notion of “salvation” is not simply a critique toward religious order, but a broader resistance to the idea of any absolute Other—divine, ethical, non-refutable—that precedes and governs the self. Instead, the poets propose that the language of transcendence does not stand on its own, but fractures in identification, revealing its dependence on the very structures it claims to exceed.
In this way, Therapon shifts the terms of relation, where self and other are not opposites but conditions of one another, intertwined yet irreducible. The relation is no longer treated as hierarchical but generative—a process through which both emerge. Such process is grounded in a more fundamental, psychoanalytical condition: the persistence of lack. The poems return repeatedly to images of wound, absence, and incompletion—not as existential failures, but as the very ground of relation:
There is a wound and there is music. There is
An abandoned car by a bridge. There is music.
[…]
Before our eyes—the geometry of the wound.
It is everywhere and nowhere. The wound wanders.
“The wound” is not attached to a single body, nor does it resolve into a narrative of injury and repair. It “wanders,” attaching itself to language, to perception, to memory. If the self is formed in relation, then it is marked from the beginning by this openness—this inability to close in on itself, the fact of it being “nowhere”, untraceable. It is precisely this incompletion that makes relation possible in the first place. Because the self is not whole, it can be addressed; because it is not self-contained, it can enter exchange.
Formally, this condition is enacted through the book’s structure. Each poem exists in relation to another, often mirroring, or answering it from a shifted perspective. In one sequence, the familiar phrase “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” is echoed and transformed into “I saw him/in the mirror listening closer than he appeared”, suggesting that perception itself becomes unstable, relational, dependent on position. Section III intensifies this effect, dissolving the boundary between the two voices into a continuous flow. What remains is an ongoing negotiation—two consciousnesses moving alongside one another, never fully merging, never entirely separate.
In this sense, Therapon does more than explore the relation between self and other, it enacts it. The poem becomes a site of mutual generation, where identity is produced through exchange. Whereas Levinas situates the ethical encounter as prior to being, Beachy-Quick and Bond relocate that encounter within language itself—unstable, mediated, and yet inescapable. The Other is no longer an absolute outsider, but a presence that both exceeds and inhabits the self.
Ultimately, the collection does not resolve such dilemma, rather, it offers a new possibility: that poetry itself might serve as a mode of existence, a way of sustaining relation without collapsing difference. The self is neither fully autonomous nor invisible; it persists in tension, in dialogue, in the ongoing act of address. Like the wound that “wanders,” meaning remains in motion—circulating between voices, words, and selves. To read Therapon is thus a unique and fruitful endeavor to bridge the gap between individual existences, however narrow or wide.