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Wanda Coleman and Austin Straus's tell-all paean to a marriage that crisscrosses the racial and cultural Maginot Lines of American society.
About the author
Wanda Coleman was the author of the poetry collections
Bathwater Wine, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and
Mercurochrome, a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as many other books of poetry, fiction, and essays. She won an Emmy Award as a writer for
Days of Our Lives. A Los Angeles native, she lived there for many years with her husband, Austin Straus. She died in November, 2013.
A poet and painter, Austin Straus is the author of the collections
Drunk with Light and
Intensifications, for which he also did the cover art. Born in Brooklyn, he has lived for many years in Los Angeles, many of them with his late wife, Wanda Coleman.
Summary
There’s plenty of love between Wanda Coleman and Austin Straus, but it has an edge: every kiss, every snuggle, every touch is political. How to make a marriage work under the unyielding pressures of racial bigotry and cultural bias? How to maintain their creativity and independence as poets and artists faced with the daily pressures of survival? For over three decades, Coleman and Straus have grappled with these questions—and with one another. Together, they have built a wall of desire, carnal and spiritual, to shield them from an often unwelcoming world. The Love Project sings their blood oath in an open and jazzy verse that holds nothing back, offering to the world some of the better that has flowered between them.
