Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage

A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection

Grace Schulman makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel there is so much out there, and it’s unbearable to miss any of it. –Wallace Shawn

Grace Schulman is an award-winning poet and the author of seven collections of poems. She has had long posts as Poetry Editor of the Nation magazine, Director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Baruch College, where she still teaches. But her love for her scientist husband and her care for him through his long illness proved to be among her greatest inspirations. It called forth her deepest grief at his loss. How did Schulman maintain the independence, solitude, and freedom she required within the bounds of marriage? And what made her marriage endure through a decade of living apart? In my experience, the phrase ‘happy marriage’ is a term of opposites, like ‘friendly fire’ or ‘famous poet.’ My marriage has been a feast of contradiction …
Strange Paradise looks at this, Schulman’s remarkable career, her friendships with great writers, her work as an historic impresario at the Y, her religious and philosophical leanings, and her grand love affair with New York–all in her magical prose.