Nationally acclaimed poet, photographer, filmmaker, and novelist James Baker Hall has long been regarded as one of Kentucky's most profound artists. Hall's growing body of work is an essential part of Kentucky's literary tradition, and yet his poetry in particular transcends the borders of the Commonwealth.The Total Light Process collects poems spanning Hall's celebrated career as well as new poems that have never before been published. The subjects of Hall's poems range f...

James Baker Hall's blackly comic coming-of-age novel has been denied, by unfortunate circumstances surrounding its original 1964 publication, its rightful place alongside classics such as Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the canon of essential late-twentieth-century American fiction.Set in Lexington, Kentucky, the story unfolds through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Yates Paul. He becomes consumed with revelations about his inattentive fath...

With his striking photographs, James Baker Hall powerfully conveys the physical experience of a Kentucky tobacco harvest. He captures the process from the tractor ride out to the field, where rows of tobacco stretch toward the horizon, to the careful, precise cutting of each individual plant, and finally, to hauling the crop away and housing it in the barn. Hall's snapshots of the "gathering of many hands" who come to help and the time-honored practices of the harvest capture the end of an...

Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry’s personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window. First designed and printed on a Washington hand press by Bob Barris at the Press on Scroll Road, Window Poems includes elegant wood engravings by Wesley Bates that complement the reflective and meditative beauty of Berry’s poems.