Old Cove Press

25/10/2022

“In 1995, before I knew James Baker Hall, I attended an exhibit of his photographs called Orphan in the Attic, and it's no exaggeration to say that show changed the way I thought about photography. Images from family albums were collaged together, then rephotographed, along with other found objects, to look like dioramas from a very personal and mysterious penny arcade. Each photograph was a kind of modernist poem, a hermetic ideogram told in images instead of words. Like the photographs of Jim's friend, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, all of these works hinted at some secret they couldn't, or wouldn't, quite reveal. There was a story here, but what was it?

The Missing Body of the Fox is that story, but like Orphan in the Attic, it is full of rough edges, impenetrable darknesses, and unanswerable questions. Like Jim Hall, I spent a great many years trying to write myself into—and I hoped eventually out of—a family tragedy that I also only dimly understood. As with Jim, there was a bedroom, a gun, a dead parent in the bed. In Jim's family, as in mine, what happened in that room was followed by shame and denial. The whole family felt it; we all took an unspoken vow of silence. As the youngest family members, the ones who understood least what had happened, Jim and I were complicit in that silence. Until we weren't. As adults, we both made a decision that the only way to shed the weight of that family secret, that family shame, was to tell the story in an effort to try and make sense of what had happened.

How does one tell such a story when memory fails or has been blocked by the protective psychic forces of repression? There are, I think, three answers: one doesn't tell the story at all, one fabricates the story through a fiction, or one admits that, though the story is incomplete and the storyteller is ill-equipped, the writer must still search for some thread into the family labyrinth. Jim chose the latter, and so The Missing Body of the Fox is filled with phrases like, "I'm speculating," "I can't remember," even "I am making this up." It represents what I would call a speculative memoir, but that does not make the book any less legitimate or urgent. Indeed, such a venture requires a considerable amount of nerve and an even greater capacity to understand a host of motives and possibilities. It is an act of the imagination ranging in search of the real. The American Pragmatists taught us that language is not so much a representation of reality, but an engagement with it. That, it seems to me, is what Jim was up to here: a radical, linguistic engagement with his familial past and his psychological present.

We cannot interrogate the su***de, though God knows we try. We can only examine the residue that remains of that life. So, as in his photography, Jim begins his memoir with images: his father's empty shotgun shells, his mother's fox stole, a glass of sour milk. Images, as Jim the photographer and poet knew, are a repository of great psychological forces. So he used them to remember his way back into the mind of his childhood self. The child's mind is, after all, governed by a metonymic logic: that is to say, the fragments are all that make sense of the larger, adult world. Those objects burn themselves into our memories, and in adulthood, they take on uncanny power. They do not so much unlock the box of secrets hidden in the attic as they illuminate the pathways the writer must follow back into his past. In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, disoriented by the Great War and much else, spoke of ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin.’ Jim wrote that when he discovered the poetry of Eliot at age nineteen, he found there a language unlike the one his family spoke, a language free of ‘cowardice, defensiveness, shallowness.’ In that genuine, probing, unflinching language, Jim wrote his poems and the prose of this memoir. Jim, like Eliot, was taking fragments of a fractured world and trying to make something out of them—something beautiful and meaningful...”

Erik Reece, from the Foreword to The Missing Body of the Fox.

The Missing Body of the Fox: A Memoir by James Baker Hall.
Available October 29, 2022 at the Kentucky Book Festival.

18/10/2022

"This is not a memoir in the usual sense. It is the story of Jim's life only as that story pertains to his attempt to recover the memory of his childhood, after early trauma, an attempt that shaped his art, just as his art finally allowed him access to that shuttered world. And so it is equally the story of his development as an artist.

Jim glimpsed his mother, from the hall, bleeding and dying, before someone thought to close the door.

His family and his community closed ranks, constructed a wall of silence around the event, perhaps acting out of a desire to shield Jim and his sister Anne, who was in adolescence by then, or out of their own embarrassment or grief.

Or perhaps out of the knowledge that there was no way they could tell this particular story—the story of the circumstances which ended in Lurlene's su***de—in a way that would help her children deal with the loss of their mother.

This was how civilized, responsible people dealt with such matters in those times, before anyone knew anything about grief counseling, or the effects of loss on children, or PTSD. The rules for right living and respectability back then were to hold your head up, get on with things, mind your own business. And button your lip.

So there was an erasure, to which everyone involved consented. Thinking to spare him, to protect him, they divorced him from his life. Instead of a living memory, there was a great, featureless, dense silence. No one ever mentioned his mother's name to Jim. If he mentioned it, he was treated to a reply that meant the subject was closed, his interest in it shameful. And Lurlene's family, except for one brother and his wife, were evidently completely out of the picture.

Jim was forty-seven when I married him. By then, he hardly knew he had a mother. She was—immaterial. Erased.

Or maybe not entirely erased. She was a story he told, occasionally, always in the same amazed, puzzled tone of voice. He told it almost as if he were himself hearing it for the first time, as if he were trying to get himself to believe it by telling it. The bed. The gun. The door. Except for her su***de, by then his mother seemed to have had no existence. No attributes, except for what could be gleaned from her wedding photograph and a few other photographs in the family album.

A beautiful, smiling, bright-eyed young woman, at first. In later photographs she looked muted, conventional..."

-- Mary Ann Taylor-Hall. From the introduction to The Missing Body of the Fox

11/10/2022

Old Cove Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Missing Body of the Fox, a memoir by renowned Kentucky poet and photographer James Baker Hall. Available October 29, 2022, at the Kentucky Book Festival. (Preorder link in the comments.)
A few years ago, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall gave me a manuscript that her husband Jim Hall had written in the last years before his death in 2009. It was an intimate memoir that dealt with the pain and enduring consequences of his mother’s su***de, which he witnessed when he was eight years old. I knew something of the story of Jim’s mother’s death because he had told me about it one day when I was dealing with my father’s death. Jim gave me the gift of his attention that day, sitting with me for hours as I tried to cope with the loss of my father. He spoke of his mother’s working class background relative to the upper-class Hall family she had married into, a marriage that damaged her spirit and ultimately led to her death at age 39.
When Mary Ann gave me Jim’s manuscript, I was open to its unusual and lyrical approach. Jim is searching in this book for a story that was largely and almost permanently lost to him. He turns to his imagination, creating scenes as he intuits they might have happened. He speculates, trying hard to remember any detail that might illuminate a childhood that was silenced by trauma, some unspeakable mix of shame and pain that all his life kept demanding to be heard. At the end of his life, he was listening and still searching for answers, and in this book he tells us what he found.
When I received the manuscript, it was just text but when I started creating the book, I had the idea to use one of Jim’s Orphan in the Attic photos as the cover. I had seen that exhibit back in 1995 and I remembered the eerie and spiritually rich nature of the images. When Sarah Wylie VanMeter sent me digital images from the series, and from Jim’s Elegies series, I was struck by the connection to the text I had just designed. I started experimenting with putting Jim’s photographs throughout the book and some alchemy started to happen that transformed the project. The Missing Body of the Fox now has eighty-five of Jim’s vivid and mysterious photographs spread across the chapters.
I hope you enjoy The Missing Body of the Fox. The book features a brilliant foreword by Erik Reece and a beautiful introduction by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall. It debuts at the Kentucky Book Festival on October 29, 2022, at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Lexington. Mary Ann will be at the table with the book. Please stop by and say hello. There will be a book launch at the University of Kentucky Art Museum on Thursday, November 17th at 6 pm. Books are available for preorder through the link in the comments section.

24/04/2022

Old Cove Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Freethinker’s Daughter, a Young Adult novel by Lexington writer Jenny O’Neill. O’Neill will read from and sign the book at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington on Monday, April 25 at 7 pm. The event is free and open to the public. This historical and inspiring coming-of-age novel for young readers explores topics of both historical and contemporary relevance as it follows a harrowing year in the life of its intrepid teenaged narrator.
The story takes us back to Lexington, Kentucky, 1833. Calendula "Cal" Farmer, a thirteen-year-old white girl, has been raised by her abolitionist, freethinking mother to reason for herself, consult her inner wisdom, and come to her own conclusions. But when a flash flood devastates her family's home, Cal is unexpectedly thrust into domestic service in a wealthy Bluegrass family's mansion. There, she encounters firsthand the physical, intellectual, and emotional brutalities of slavery. Later, a cholera outbreak kills a quarter of the population and Cal's life is profoundly changed.
Cal's story is sure to captivate readers as she confronts the injustices and uncertainties of racism, class consciousness, epidemic disease, and personal loss with independent thinking, perseverance, and love. The book features cover art by Morgan County painter Pam Oldfield Meade.

27/08/2021

25/08/2021

"...sometimes, a poet renders their experience in such a way that it simultaneously breaks and mends your heart anew. English Lit is one of those books. Bernard Clay’s poetry is compelling, heartfelt, and transformative."

A terrific review of English Lit and interview with Bernard Clay in the Southern Review of Books.

An interview with Bernard Clay about his debut poetry collection, “English Lit.”

25/08/2021

Twenty years ago, I met a young poet from Louisville named Bernard Clay. He was unpublished but he was putting his work out there in chapbooks he did himself. The books featured his artwork on the cover. I liked everything about them. The honesty and power of his words stopped me. I read “The Good Couch,” “I Still Ride the TARC,” “English Lit,” and many others with serious interest and admiration. I waited for his first book to appear, which I was sure was imminent. I lost track of Bernard but I never forgot about him and I never forgot his work. I kept an eye out for his first book.

Then fifteen years went by and one day I got an email from Bernard, saying, “Hey, do you remember me?” He couldn’t have known how often Gurney and I talked about him, that we hoped he was still writing, and that we still looked for a book to appear. When I found out no book was in the works, I asked him if he would be interested in working with Old Cove on a volume of his poems. He said yes and in 2020 we did a limited release of English Lit: Poems by Bernard Clay. Old Cove then entered into a partnership with Ohio University/Swallow Press to release a revised and expanded edition of the book. And now the new English Lit: Poems by Bernard Clay has been released, the first title from Old Cove Press and Swallow Press. The book features cover art by Ronald Davis.

Crystal Wilkinson wrote this about the collection: “There is no other poet living or dead that I can say this about but I’ve been waiting on a book from Bernard Clay for more than twenty years. Every time I’ve ever read a single poem by him or heard him read a poem aloud I’ve wanted a volume of his work in my hands. He’s always had the ability to slice truth down to the bone and hold it up to the light. He’s grown more wise and his skills are sharp. I’m thankful these words are in the world and I’m certain that every reader who reads them will feel the same way.”

From Kelly Norman Ellis: “One of the great blessings of Bernard Clay’s poetry is the clear, unflinching black voice. Clay writes from that black centered way of seeing in this ode to Black Louisville. Clay is the urban Affrilachian who is rooted in the silt and river of ‘the lilac and the dogwood and the pear and the redbud.’ The greens of his grandmother’s garden, the plastic on the good couch, the rides on TARC, Clay is bound to this Kentucky life both city and country. English Lit is a rich debut collection which is certain to become a classic of Kentucky literature.“

And from Frank X Walker: “Crafted with a black farmer’s heart, the poems in English Lit blast off from the West End (the best end) into a brave new world. One of the most rooted and nappiest voices of his generation, Clay delivers a beautiful tribute to his people, his community, and his generation’s dance with words, adding his name to the litany of Kentucky poets who love both the land and its people.”

Please join Bernard for his debut reading of English Lit at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville (2720 Frankfort Ave,) on September 9th at 7:00 p.m.

The book can be ordered from Swallow Press: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/English+Lit

To connect with Bernard for interviews, readings, workshops or other projects, contact him through his website: https://www.bernard-clay.com

21/08/2021