The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry

Description

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.

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.

"Coleman joins with her husband, poet/painter Straus, to offer the story of a marriage that crosses racial and cultural lines. An affecting, even sweet, account touched by a political knife's edge." --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "One of the royal couples of the L.A. poetry scene." --LA Weekly "If any young, wistful romantics out there suppose marriage might be an easy ride, let them read The Love Project and be wiser. If there are cynics who scoff at the idea that a certain man and a certain woman can be bound together by destiny and their own immortal love, and, in the whole galaxy, there could be no one better suited for either of them than each other, then those jaded ones must read The Love Project and promptly admit before all creation--and on YouTube--that they were wrong. The rest of us, meanwhile, will celebrate this fascinating collaboration by one of the region's premier poet couples because it provides what has been lately hard to come by: naked, tender, fierce and funny love poems for our times." --Suzanne Lummis, author of In Danger "In the unique geography of any marriage, there are many and varied landscapes, cityscapes, main arteries, side streets, and dark alleyways. Wanda Coleman & Austin Straus have mapped theirs with courage, passion, anger, joy, exasperation, and gratitude in language that speaks--and sings--to anyone openhearted enough to hear." --Stephen Kessler, author of Moving Targets: On Poets, Poetry & Translation and The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters "If our world revolved around Straus and Coleman, there would be no need for Venus, other planets or stars. This is a book of feelings and not just words. Tenderness can be found throughout The Love Project. This is not hit-and-run loving. This is Watts undressing for Brooklyn. It's a husband and wife leaving teeth marks and a place for tongues on this institution we call marriage. What is poetry without intimacy? Straus and Coleman is that couple holding hands after the movies. Desire is the place they call home." --E. Ethelbert Miller, author of How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love "Translating their marriage into poetry, Wanda Coleman and Austin Straus have composed an unsettling love potion of inner demons, tumultuous 'scenes de menage, ' euphoric portraits of each other, and succulent make-up sex. These writings are not for the faint of heart. --Alta Ifland, author of Death-in-a-Box and The Snail's Song "This collection is an impassioned love duet on steroids, a feast of contemporary love poems by two highly engaging and accomplished poets who are lifetime soul-mates. Wanda Coleman's complex black L.A. muse sings 'a rich mutual insatiable lust, ' so transporting that 'even jazz can't go there, ' while Austin Straus's dead-ahead Brooklyn Jewish muse laughs out loud with delineating 'how our bodies glow together, ' and announces with exuberant delight: 'I love the way you ruin my day!'" --Steve Kowit, author of The Dumbbell Nebula and The First Noble Truth "The marriage of true minds, it turns out, does admit impediment--as well as dispute, desolation, distance--when, as Straus puts it, 'the hot dump we call home fills with blood.' The Love Project admits all--mutual admiration, intimate babble they dub 'Deep English, ' pet names for sundry nooks of each others' bodies, laughter that binds, an ongoing magnetism of desire pulling them back together again and again. And, above all, the consolation of abiding love, 'love at the door pounding, eager to help him remember forever who he is, who they can be together.' Between them, Coleman and Straus ravel a gorgeous document, a full-color rendering of their long relationship--not a stable portrait, b