ABSTRACT
I haven’t crossed the bridge that is your back, my mother’s back, though, because it seems that the bridge that is your back, my mother’s back, needs to be made wider and wider and longer and longer. This bridge, it seems, needs never to be crossed. Instead, it needs always to be inhabited so as to “be the bridge to nowhere / But my true self” (xxii), as Donna Kate Rushin sings. This bridge of backs and books needs to be, perhaps, a bridge into a delta instead of across a fluid flux from one hard terrain to another. The bridge, the water, and the sediment comprise the world I see in your book, a better world than the rock-hard you-I, I-you world of terra firma. “There is,” as one of you notes, “an enormous contradiction in being a bridge” (206). That contradiction expands as the bridge expands more and more to nowhere but our true selves.
