The Bridge Has No Railings

The Bridge Has No Railings is an extraordinary collection of poems. In the depths of loss, Elizabeth Johnson created works of art from great pain. Many artists begin this way, and when the grief has calmed a bit, they leave their art behind. Read the opening section of this book. Find remarkable poems, burned on the page, as she writes of the death of her daughter. But Johnson, unlike so many others, did not abandon her art, the making of poems.

What we have in this collection is a vision of a life lived and memory honored, a vision of a poet putting into language the big story of all that has mattered to her. This is a remarkable achievement. Read these vivid poems, find the heart and mind of the poet inside these words. We are lucky that Elizabeth Johnson wrote those first poems, luckier still that she sustained her commitment to giving us her world in this book.

-Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poems, and of from tiger to prayer