Cold Thief Place

I regularly create covers and interior packages for the poetry press Alice James Books. Here is just one example of our many collaborations.

Visually speaking, poetry books look different from nonfiction business books or long novels. Most poems only take up one or two pages.

Creating moments for the reader to pause and enjoy a poem is an important part of laying out any poetry collection. I always follow the poet’s lead on where to add page breaks.

As the typesetter, I take great care to lay out each poem exactly as the poet wrote them. Sometimes poems are written as couplets (left-page), other times they are single-line stanzas (right page).