Description

"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 clich , 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"



About the Author

Lauren Crux is an interdisciplinary artist oscillating between writing, photography, and performance. She is also a psychotherapist with an ear for the story under the story. Her irreverent humor, social commentary, and tender regard for life's messiness, have found their way into numerous publications, and onto the stage in solo and community-based performances. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

www.laurencrux.com

Praise For…

"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 clich , 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

"In Difficult Beauty, Lauren Crux offers us wise, elegant, observant poems that delineate and celebrate everyday epiphanies, and she’s paired her poems with photographs that neither illustrate, nor make any suggestion as to how the poems should be read—they are simply companions on the journey of this moving collection. Difficult Beauty is a rare gem, the perfect amalgam of the visual and the verbal, a sublime pairing that satisfies the eye, the ear, and the heart."

—Gary Young, author of Even So: New and Selected Poems, and That's What I Thought

"I love the look of Difficult Beauty as a poem-object. It is both concrete and porous. Crux’s images take up about the same amount of ground as the words that speak beside them. Each pair seems to be a counterweight against forgetting. Here, Crux seems to say. And here too. Lauren’s Crux’s work is distilled. It acknowledges the importance of a gesture. It pays homage to the minimalism of the postcard. She asks us to pay attention to what Kathleen Fraser called the “coincidental” texture of joy, those phenomena of no substance and no duration that make up consciousness."

––Camille Norton, author of A Folio for the Dark, and Corruption

"Writer and artist Lauren Crux has brought forth an extraordinary vision in her new collection of short prose and photography, Difficult Beauty. Her photographs are wonderful—elegant, unique and thoughtful. Alongside them, Crux’s prose poems carry the reader along. As a poet/philosopher, we meet in her work the world of daily life and the sublime as they touch each other, as dancing cats, at mountain retreats, in Zen Master teachings, alongside the complexities of love, mortality, illness, happiness, writing, and creativity, written by a woman with a unique, quirky eye for the absurd in the everyday, and the beauty in the difficult. Wise, funny, profound, Difficult Beauty is a true gem of a book.”

--Carolyn Brigit Flynn, author of Communion, and editor of Sacred Stone, Sacred Water and Sisters Singing