nails and bullets

By Steve Miller
Photographs by david sorrell
Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Red Hydra Press, 2017. Edition of 60.
6 x 9.25; 32 pages. Typeface: Poliphilus. Designed and letterpress printed by Steve Miller. Binding designed by Anna Embree. Photographs printed at Puritan Press Inc. using a digital tritone process. Bound in maroon book cloth. Numbered. Signed by Miller and Sorrell.
Steve Miller: "When I first saw David Sorrell's photographic figures they took me back to my early 20's. I was deeply passionate about poetry, art, books, architecture, landscape and nature - basically wildly interested in everything and not understanding how to channel it into something tangible. ... At the same time I was becoming fully aware of my attraction to men. I don't remember being confused or in denial about it. It just was, and it had a strong gravitational pull.
"I recently found a briefcase full of things from that time in my life - 1973 - 1975. Letters, class notes, landscape plans, prose wonderings, and poems full of questions. In reading them I met the young man I was then, a boy who was thrilled, full of energy, and confused, but pulling the oars ahead through fog. Years later novelist Joseph Hansen sent me one of his books with its smart, gay insurance investigator, and inscribed, 'At 16 I bent down to pick a flower, and when I stood up I was 60.' Instigated by encountering Sorrel's photos are words that come from an earlier life."