Bone Orchard

In this collaborative work, death row prisoner George T. Wilkerson, criminology professor Robert Johnson, and poet Kat Bodrie use poetry, prose, and fiction to explore the dynamics of life under sentence of death. Grounded in the first-hand experiences of the authors, and enriched by interviews and surveys with prisoners on death row, Bone Orchard examines the ways a death sentence poses unique existential and emotional burdens on the condemned and those who love them. "Like all great art," noted one reviewer, "this somberly magnificent book tells us things beyond our previous imaginings and makes us see familiar things in a new light... The oppressions of life we all share, and which condemned prisoners bear with a special intensity, are transmuted into rare beauty through the vivid poetry and prose of these pages."