It’s me.
The cover went through a few stages.
At first I thought I wanted a collage of the poems and concepts covered in the book.
I tried a few versions.
But it felt flat. I wasn’t confident sharing the book with friends or family. When my poetry publisher put it in bookshops online, it felt like I was trying to introduce the concepts of the book to soften the readers exposure to the poems.
This segment from the intro of my collection provides ample reason for why I wanted the cover to be a soft landing into the collection;
This book wasn't written for you. I didn't intend for it to happen. The poems that initiated this collection were selected as the only poems I had out of all the poems I'd written that had potential. The recurring theme between the selected poems at the time was my attempt at translating grief after going into early labour and losing my daughter. I intentionally sent a ton of poems to a publishing friend to avoid overwhelming him with that experience. He, unintentionally, pulled out the ones associated with her, and here she is, unintentionally arriving in your hands like she unintentionally arrived in our life.Â
These poems were written in silence and isolation. What happened to me was a burden, a sadness too dark to talk about. The only place I felt safe to elicit her existence and the intense emptiness within was through poetry. I wanted so much for her to be real rather than this awful circumstance. I wanted her to be more than the silent trauma she was within the secrets of a hospital. I also wanted to be a mom. It occurred to me in the editing of this collection that the isolate, intimate act of writing poetry mirrored the isolate, intimate act of early motherhood. I tended to my grief like a mom tends to a newborn.
These poems were a way for me to feel what I could not touch, hold who didn't survive, keep me company in the sleepless nights my body had prepared itself for post-birth, and feed the part of me that I couldn't with the milk I'd made. They weren't written to be read.Â
In the end, I lay out album covers and poetry collections and the ones that drew me in where portraits. The book covers I liked most were portraits of the artists or authors. Then I remembered this image of me carrying my first born son.
There’s something about the
form of my body a cast of pregnancy once off the body empty of child.
that I could not argue with being the cover of my book about birth, loss, motherhood, body-autonomy and life post trauma; my alternative post-natal experience in this collection of poems. It had to be me as the carrier of life.
Thank you family x