There are some wonderful poetry book covers/designs, and some terrible ones. Some rather excellent ones I can think of off the top of my head include Lisa Jarnot's Black Dog Songs and Noelle Kocot's Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems. Alice Notley's Grave of Light also has a very clean, eye-catching design built around a collage that Notley herself created.
The former two books were both designed by Quemadura. Does anyone know anything about them? The website is very stripped down, but a look through their "works" page is an education in good cover design, particularly for poetry, which suffers from a lot of cliches and just plain unimaginative design. For example, take "the painting-in-a-box" design. Ughhhh. Another poetry design horrible is the problem of the way-too-literal designer. Matt Cook's Eavesdrop Soup will always stand out for me in this regard.
Any other outstanding (or hideous) recent poetry book designs that you can think of? When I am back at home and surrounded by my books, I think I'll start blogging my critiques of the designs/covers of random poetry books from off my shelves. This will help me to categorize and consolidate my own thoughts on design, while getting feedback from you guys. We can have passionate disagreements about the appropriateness of certain typefaces!
It will be totally rad.
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
