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 father's loneliness, his grandmother's stormy relationship with his boisterous alcoholic uncle, and the frustration of being the best photography assistant in town when no one else knows it. In pursuing his career and falling in love with women twice his age, the precocious Yates falls back on Walter Mittyesque day-dreams to cope with a frequently humorous, sometimes dark, world.

Long respected among literary insiders, sought after but nearly impossible to obtain, this "lost" classic will finally reach the wider audience it deserves.

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 from humorous and revealing portraits of his fellow writers and friends Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, and Gurney Norman, to the traumatic experience of his mother's suicide when he was eight years old, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the tragic murder of Matthew Shepherd.

James Baker Hall, the former Kentucky Poet Laureate and a native of Kentucky, has taught creative writing at the University of Kentucky since 1973. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford. Hall is the author of five volumes of poetry, two novels, and four collections of photography. His works include Praeder's Letters; Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings; and Tobacco Harvest.

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 handpress by Bob Barris at the Press on Scroll Road, this book includes elegant wood engravings by Wesley Bates that complement the reflective and meditative beauty of Berry's poems.