Pending further revisions (always a danger in this business), we have a cover design for Rot Contracts, Jessica Lawson‘s poetry chapbook due out August 11th! The design is every bit as understated as the collection itself, but don’t be fooled; beneath the sterile, legalese exterior is a set of heartbreakingly raw poems with white-hot intensity. It’s just an intensity that happens to come with a notary seal on the front. Jeremy Tinianow‘s full design is below.
One little Easter egg with this design is that the book’s trim size–8.5 x 7 inches–is the size you get by folding a sheet of US legal paper in half. Just because the book is emotionally raw doesn’t mean we don’t love puns enough to bake one into the physical form of the book itself.
Preorders will open on Father’s Day, June 21st, 2020 through a Kickstarter campaign. Crowdfunding was not part of the original plan for this book; we debated it back in March and April, when the coronavirus pandemic was really taking hold in the US, and ultimately decided to go through with it. We are, as the banner says, a very small publisher, and we feel that the current state of things in the US would make it unwise to assume that brick-and-mortar bookstores or live author events will be safe and accessible by August. This decision is mainly in the interest of emphasizing preorders more aggressively than we would be able to otherwise.
The upside to this is that you’ll be able to order the book through Kickstarter for significantly cheaper than it would be through normal retail. So, if you love experimental queer poetry but find yourself having to tighten your budget (like us), this could, in fact, be very good news on that front!
The print and ebook editions of Rot Contracts will both be available for preorder, as will a slew of other rewards that we’ll announce when the campaign gets posted. Until then, watch this space!
