Böcker utgivna av Many Names Press

"Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations" by fine artist and writer Lauren Crux, pairs 66 full-color images from Lauren's long standing photography practice with her frank musings that initially started as a mail art project. A book that offers the reader bits of daily life, in which little things go vast. A visual and contemplative balm to the spirit: for who in these times cannot use a bit of comfort, intelligence, and good humor? "The rambles balance intimacy with openness, artistry with colloquial thought and speech. Crux's gaze is simultaneous vast and minute (which I am coming, I think, to understand, is the way of the soul of Lauren Crux). Just when we think we've come on a silly throw away line, or a cliché, or a normal point of view, she turns the phrase and raise the stakes on us. But she's not showing off. She's just talking to us." -Camille Dungy, author of "Soil: the Story of a Black Mother's Garden" and "Guidebook to Relative Strangers"¿

This is the infrastructure of a poet's life. A kid in love reading to his first-grade teacher. An old man walking with friends in an Oregon forest. A carpenter on the courthouse steps, telling how to build a place of refuge. With his wife, Jenny, hearing war planes over a desert hot spring. On Nascar Demolition Derby Night at the Modoc County Fair. It was better than the Iraq War. No one was killed. Admission was only eight dollars. A poem uncovers the underworld's plot to overthrow Christmas and capitalism. Another records a watershed meeting, the multi-species discussion of whether to let the humans in. In a state park on an overgrown trail, crossing a rotten bridge, the title poem tries to answer Jenny's question: how did it get like this? A poem requested for a friend whose young son just died in a senseless accident. The infrastructure we turn to: fledgling swallows on a power line, big mouths, pale fluff, scared and hungry. How soon they'll fly and be gone. We live in a nest of broken shells. On the Big Island a quarter-mile-long ten-foot wall, huge carved blocks of lava, yet with a wide open gate to those seeking refuge. On the eastern slope of the Sierras, a circular pool of concrete and stone, three Vietnam vets soak in our common history. In a repair shop on Broadway, LouAnn who has small hands is replacing a burned-out headlight. I can't even get to it. The other guy in the waiting room has just come from taking his wife to the cancer clinic. We talk about when cars were real. Looking for infrastructure in a world that's been designed to break and not be fixed.

When Eli Whitney turned 13, a special special education teacher taught him how to use facilitated communication to spell words. Eli, born mute and with little control of his muscles, began relaying thoughtful poems on family, politics, and life as an adult. His mother, the poet Louise Grassi Whitney, transcribed the words from a spelling board to handwriting. Eli Whitney is now in his late 30s and living in a group home in San Rafael, California. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019942029