
Firesticks
By James Baker Hall
Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur Press, 2008. Edition of 26.
11.5 x 14.5" black cloth-covered portfolio case with ribbon ties. Paper letterfold adhered to back pastedown contains 3 photographs and 4 broadsides plus a sheet with the Colophon. Handset text in Cloister Lightface type. Letterpress printed with a hand-fed C & P onto Gampi Torinoko paper, handmade in Japan. Photographs giclée prints printed by James Baker Hall. Case handbound in Japanese bookbinding cloth and Curtis paper.
JA portfolio honoring rural Kentucky, Firesticks includes four broadsides of James Baker Hall's poems, printed by Larkspur Press, and three of Hall’s photographs printed by himself.
A native Kentuckian, in 2001 Hall was named the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He was a graduate if the University of Kentucky with a B.A. in English and received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University. He began teaching at the University of Kentucky in 1973 and for the next thirty years acted as director of the creative writing program. In 2003, he retired as professor emeritus.
The poems: "Dividing Ridge," "Pulse," and "The Relinquishments" from "Stopping on the Edge to Wave" (1988); "With Deer" from The Mother on the Other Side of the World (1999).
The photographs: Cave Horse, Red Sky Cows, and Horse Head Torque.
$1,500