Flacofolio
Micro-Essays by Leonard Schwartz   
Images by Heide Hatry

ISBN ​978-1-963908-54-1      100 pages         $20.00

Sample text of Flacofolio at Cable Street 

Flacofolio fosters the mystery of this haunting hero who so briefly graced and enraptured NYC. Replete with insightful spirit-treasures, this book throws up the bones of the many nourishing cultures from across the world, housed in one resilient city. Humor and tragedy interweave here. Flacofolio soars with luminous artwork, bringing passed wings flapping again into a vibrant Now. With a beak at the peak of acuity, Flaco perches atop urbanity with a wide Third Eye, and homes in on scintillating souvenirs. From the locked-down apartment window, who is the voyeur and who is the lantern-eyed? From the cage of constraint, who is the liberator, and who is being liberated?     

This remarkable encounter between a people and a bird, and between a poet and a visual artist, is also a beautiful ode to New York City.  It is filled with surprising insights and startling cultural references.  All in all, it makes for a perfect gift to give a lover of nature, or a spiritual treasure to hold onto and cherish. 
   Phillip Lopate      

Books are spaces of memory, an idea poignantly embodied in the book-based assemblages that Heide Hatry has set in dialogue with Leonard Schwartz’s suite of poems. Hatry’s cut, collaged, vividly staged scenes, part reliquary and part theatrical vignette, demonstrate exquisitely and deliberately the evidential and affective power of materials, and celebrate and preserve the spirit of Flaco the beloved Eagle Owl, whose symbolic freedom captivated New York. Their rich archaeology connects Flaco with an intertextual field of associations and references through which the artist invokes her personal memory of a shared cultural experience. 
   Joanna Drucker, author of The Century of Artist’s Books and The Book as Art     

In this exceedingly beautiful work, Schwartz and Hatry have bequeathed to us a portrait of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl–a companion for derelict times that we did not know we needed. Woven from the winged creature’s debris, the book tells a tragic tale; in Flaco’s inscrutable gaze, we glimpse our own refracted through the ash and bone of the eagle-owl’s remaindered substance. In this majestic and somber portrait of a homely fate, Schwartz and Hatry have composed a fable for the permanent apocalypse which is our now.
Alexi Kukuljevic, author of Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently (MIT University Press)

Hatry’s evocative images add an intense emotional dimension to this absorbing series of meditations on the life and (imagined) experience of the celebrated Eagle Owl. 
   Errol Fuller, author of Extinct Birds, Lost Animals, and Voodoo Salon

Heide Hatry and Flaco the Owl, what a perfect couple. Hatry has also escaped from her artworld cage and what better tribute to nature’s brave non-human souls than her witty and heartfelt collages.
   Lucy R. Lippard, art critic, activist, curator, and writer of 26 books