{"id":23274,"date":"2017-07-28T06:18:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T13:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=23274"},"modified":"2017-07-28T06:18:41","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T13:18:41","slug":"anatomy-of-a-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=23274","title":{"rendered":"Anatomy of a Book Cover"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago, I received from my publisher, Guernica Editions<\/a>, the final proof of the cover of my new book of poems, Words For What Those Men Have Done\u00a0<\/em>and I am really happy with it.\u00a0The design, of course, is the work of Guernica\u2019s Allen Jomoc, Jr., but the concept is largely mine:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Almost from the moment Words for What Those Men Have Done<\/em> started to take shape in my imagination as a book, I thought of it as a companion to my first volume of poetry, The Silence of Men<\/a>,<\/em> published by CavanKerry Press<\/a> in 2006. The poems in both books emerge from the same set of concerns about how the sexual violence I survived as a child has shaped my life as a man and how I, as I live that life, try to hold myself accountable for what I have learned as a survivor. I chose Words for What Those Men Have Done\u00a0<\/em>as the title\u2014it\u2019s a line from the last poem in the book\u2014because I wanted to move from the act of breaking silence, which is what I did in The Silence of Men,<\/em> to the act of holding \u201cthose men\u201d accountable. From exploring, in other words, what it means to say, out loud and without shame,\u00a0I was sexually violated\u00a0<\/em>to claiming the consequences of refusing to be silent. I wanted the covers of the two books to reflect that progression as well.<\/p>\n

This is the cover for The Silence of Men,<\/em> which I think is gorgeous:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Cusack<\/a>, CavanKerry\u2019s Design and Production Manager at the time, actually painted that image in response to the poems in the book. In fact, the painting now hangs above my piano:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very striking cover. In fact, telling its story, i.e., that Peter painted it, has helped me sell not a few copies of the book over the years. What struck me as I thought about the connection I wanted to establish between it and Words for What Those Men Have Done, <\/em>however, was my sense that the man on the cover of The Silence of Men<\/em>\u00a0is, at one and the same time, a man being silenced (by flowers!) about things that have happened\/been done to him and a man being silenced about what he has witnessed\u2014about, in other words, things that happened to others, that he has seen, and that he does not yet have words for.<\/p>\n

So, when Guernica\u2019s editor Michael Mirolla asked me for concept and art suggestions for the cover of the new book, I went looking through the images I own for pictures that would do two things: carry over the theme of bearing witness from one book cover to the next and suggest the process of finding a way to communicate the trauma that was witnessed.<\/p>\n

The first image I found is one that I\u2019ve used on this blog before, which reminds of the kind of self-portrait a child who\u2019s been violated might draw when asked to by, say, a therapist:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The second image I sent Michael is also one I\u2019ve used before, a man\u2019s eye looking straight ahead through a pair of glasses:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It turned out, though, that I didn\u2019t have a file with high enough resolution for that image to work, and so Michael suggested the picture that we ultimately used:<\/p>\n

\"\"The result is not just really cool on its own; it interacts with the title, Words of What Those Men Have Done,<\/em>\u00a0in just the way I want it to, while also carrying over the themes from the cover of The Silence of Men<\/em> in just the way I was hoping for:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago, I received from my publisher, Guernica Editions, the final proof of the cover of my new book of poems, Words For What Those Men Have Done\u00a0and I am really happy with it.\u00a0The design, of course, is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23274"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23277,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23274\/revisions\/23277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}