ISBN: 0-88739-104-4
74 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Paperback Original
Price: $15.00
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Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood
Sandy Diamond
Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood are attendants in a mental institution. In and out of hospitals, a young manic-depressive artist gives us an insider's view of madness, In rough-hewn visual language, Sandy Diamond carves her journey from the abyss-broken back, shattered memory, paper shoes-to the artist thirty years later "walking on air." The way is studded with hunchbacks and painters, lovers and healers, a catatonic, a medicine man's baby.
The narrator's passion for and allegiance to art makes Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood a love story. When the artist rides the subway, impasto and glaze cover her fellow passengers. The names of oil colors ooze with sensuality; kitchen receptacles serve as palettes "until everything tasted of Mars Violet and Viridian."
This is Sandy Diamond's first book of poetry. Her voice-furious, sorrowful, rhapsodic and funny-is, above all, the voice of a storyteller.
Beneath the literal story of Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood seethes everyone's story-as we fight what is oppressive to the body and the spirit, as we redeem what was lost, we strive to be the authors of our lives.
Review: "Begin Sandy Diamond's Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood, and you will have to finish it. As powerful as a long novel...compassionate...a work of art that functions as a path to understanding to painful, healing truth."
-May Sarton
Bio: SANDY DIAMOND was born in Cleveland in 1936 and grew up in Gates Mills, Ohio. She studied literature at Brandeis University and received a BFA from Columbia University's College of Painting & Sculpture under a painting fellowship.
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