Prison life, becoming a prisoner`s wife, trying to touch through bars and whisper sweet things through plate glass windows. She lives a life of orange, bright blues, sepia and silk, bubbled bath water, scented candles and frankincense and myrrh. He lives a life of waiting, hope colored in grey and rough like rocks, a life that smells like the air is in short supply.

This is a love story like every love story I had always known, like no other love story I had ever imagined. Asha Bandele`s latest book, a memoir titled The Prisoner`s Wife begins with these words and attempts to answer the above questions for herself and then for the rest of the world. It is the story of her and her husband Rashid who is serving a twenty years to life sentence in an upstate New York correctional facility. In this extraordinary tale for some and common experience for many others, Asha relinquishes all holds to social and emotional boundaries and crosses thickly demarcated lines.

In the definite space between ghetto bird and debutante, a young college student with brilliance between her ears and a rare thirst for complexity and challenge in her heart falls in love with a prisoner and becomes his wife. Quickly she learns that someone always has something to say behind her back. They blame her marriage on low self-esteem, her weight, her hair, hyper-boredom or drama queen dreams, everything but the real reason: love.

Asha is a Hunter alumna, a legendary president of the Black Student Union as well as former president of Undergraduate Student Government. Her first book, Absence in the Palm of My Hands, published in 1996, is a stunning collection of poetry where words spin on paper. Big her up for all she`s accomplished at such a young age given the typical obstacles: Black, Woman, Artist. The Prisoner`s Wife is about the struggle of a writer in New York, who found love in a stone edifice against her own initial desires and those of families and friends.

Mentored by the late poet, Audre Lorde, Asha rocks passages like Sonia Sanchez, creating fireballs of language that singe your eyelashes and make you catch your breath. The words are an automatic loaded with dumdum bullets, an Uzi hung out of the car window spitting death into the tree-lined street. She kicks the erotic in a way that erases the image of a cellblock. Imagine Pablo Neruda strolling into a Brooklyn bodega trying to kick one of his beautiful love sonnets to one of the homegirls buying a Hostess honybun. That is Asha, infusing tenderness with the slickness of a Biggie Small`s rhyme. She`s the bad girl inside Toni Morrison where sentences read like hip hop arpeggios a sonorous birds taking flight in the Georgia Sea Islands.

Asha is a true baller, a ninja lover who makes it work even if she`s got to pray to many gods to get her point across. Jesus, here I am, here I am, here, here, genuflecting at the altar…Allah. I`m facing the ka`ba on my knees. My forehead is to the ground. Can you see me Obatala, Yemaja, Ellegba? I`m here at the crossroads standing in need of direction …Am I close, am I far… Can you see me, who can see me?…who can hear me? Who`s willing to come bargain with the prisoner`s wife?