Chaco Sojourn: Chaco Sojourn; He Belongs to Nobody; The Girl who Painted Gourds; Desert Threnody (4 volumes)

Denver: Dry Creek Art Press, 2022. Very limited edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. SIGNED. Quarto [30 cm] Printed and bound by Leon Loughridge. 1/4 salmon-colored paper with tan paper over boards, and pictorial labels mounted to the front boards. Decorative pastedowns. A few minor imperfections here and there. In a gray paper covered slipcase with a paper title label on the spine, and an illustrated paper title label on the front panel. The slipcase shows only very slight wear. Number 10 in an edition limited to only 30. Signed by both Macker and Loughridge on the limitation page of the first volume. Both author and artist have signed elsewhere in the set as well.

Chaco Sojourn consists of four short stories by New Mexico author John Macker. Macker's stories follow a thread through different periods of time in Chaco Canyon, NM. Each book is illustrated with woodblocks and serigraphs.

A lovely specimen of fine press printing.

"So, my roots involved that generation of artists and wordslingers who came of age in the 1950's and 1960's, who wrote with a radical new spontaneity and vision that was based in large part, on the way people talked to each other on the streets, responses to cultural suffocation, the atom bomb, drugs, Vietnam and sex. Also, the little small press literary mags and their attendant scenes that began springing up all over America, edited by Judson Crews, Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, William Margolis, Wallace Berman, and many others, had their origin stories in that generation.

"My own voice found its origins in the texts of these poets but also through a carefree diet of indiscriminate and voracious reading throughout the years. Prose writers such as Kerouac, Roberto Bola o, Charles Bowden and Cormac McCarthy come to mind. My true voice came, with the most potency, from the landscapes and natural beauty I found in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. I grew up in the west, my grandfather was a cowboy and a rancher, so I absorbed the landforms early on. I've always been intrigued by the relationship of humans to their environments. It sounds like a well-worn theme but it also involves ritual, magic, Native American history, the desert and the Blues." - John Macker (An Interview with John Macker / North of Oxford: Reviews, Commentary, Essays, Poetry).