The Book Of Crow
Lyle Rexer
ISBN 978-1-963908-26-8 208 pages $20.00
The Book of Crow was born while the author pondered weak and weary over many a volume of forgotten lore, and became a fact during the isolation of Covid. Crow is a series of meditations and short stories in the voice of a crow, wised up, funny, vulnerable and bemused. Composed by the alter-ego of a fictional, bird-obsessed docent at the American Museum of Natural History, The Book of Crow touches everything from revolution and billiard parlors in Latin America to avian necrophilia, pandemics, and the second coming of Rodan, Toho Studios' greatest science fiction creation. Crow travels the world to escape ennui, idolizes Colin Kaepernick, and meets the poet John Berryman in his last moments. Following Crow's flight path will take readers from wherever they are to places they never imagined. Crow's physical appearance is brilliantly rendered by the drawings of Donald Alberti.
" …this cool, quiet riot of a novella in thirty parts—a wise, magically unreal Boomer’s Guide to the Anthropocene…”
Andre Spears, poet, author of XIII Ship of State
"Crow’s chronicle…is delivered through an associational logic that yields heart-stopping observations and insights as surprising as they are wondrously idiosyncratic.”
Chris Grimes, author of The Pornographers, and
Public Works: Short Fiction and a Novella
on Lyle Rexer
We may have lost our innocence, but Lyle Rexer
brilliantly leads us to a deepened appreciation for the potential, poetry, and
pleasure of photographic images.
Sally Mann, photographer
There are few books with this uncanny, piercing
clarity; this one should be not only on every student's bookshelf, but on that
of anyone interested in understanding how images function today.
José Luis
Falconi, Brandeis University
I love how curious, and sensitive these readings of
pictures are, bringing me into the photographer’s mind. I felt I was seeing
some images (that I know well) for the first time. The writing is totally
visual, stimulated and stimulating....
Lisa
Kereszi, photographer,
Yale
School of Art
Lyle Rexer holds two degrees from Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford University. He is the author of many books, including How to Look at Outsider Art (2005), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (2009), for which he was awarded a grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, and The Critical Eye: 15 Pictures to Understand Photography (2019). He has published hundreds of catalogue essays, reviews, and articles on art, photography, and contemporary literature and contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Art in America, Aperture, BOMB, Harper’s, and the Brooklyn Rail. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions in the United States and internationally and has lectured at many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University.
