Burnt Offerings: Poems on Crime and Punishment

Burnt Offerings is a book of original poems by a distinguished criminologist that takes the reader on what one prisoner called "an elegiac journey from crime to arrest to confession to trial and ultimately to prison" (Charles Huckelbury, State Prison for Men, Concord, New Hampshire). "Like a surgeon, "states Erin George, a woman serving time in Fluvanna, a Virginia prison, "Johnson deftly exposes the sepsis that is the penal system of our ostensibly progressive society." And like nothing before it, Burnt Offerings opens "a window onto an alien, forbidding landscape... We are brought into the world of concertina wire and steel, the world of broken men and women longing for human touch and kindness with such power that we are forced to see and feel what Americans have chosen to ignore far too long: we are warehousing humans behind those walls... Burnt Offerings will not be forgotten" (Susan Nagelsen, Professor of Writing, New England College).