The Heathen are Coming

I had a good time designing this one. The cover's made up of the following: The central image is "16 Circles," by Rosemary Starace. Rosemary's art is badass. You should go to her site and just cruise around.

The background on this image comes from part of a blank page from Century Magazine Volume VII (1884-85). The font for the title was created from the title page of the Century, and the font for Lesley Wheeler's name is manipulated from an inscription printed from Mark Twain's handwriting in the early editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Coincidentally, some of the first serialized passages of Huck Finn were in Volume VII of the Century.

Then there are the poems. Here's the title poem:

HEATHEN


My son fits his ear to my ear
so that the god in your head can talk
to the god in mine. I hear a forest
creak like the binding of a book.

It is full of red wings, bogs,
and ravenous beasts, yet he treads
safely in his own wildness.
Me, I’m afraid. The god in my head

is a bear and not the talking kind.
He rears up, slavering, unsheathes
his nails, famished for sacrifice.
His prison is a vast cold heath.

I hope the bear is asleep. At the edge
of his cave, flowers breathe. Scent blows
from me and the she-wolf in my son
catches it, pushes her snout to the rose

canal and snuffles. He likes to leash
her in vines and she likes to snap them. Gods
abhor quiet, the skull-bone closing.
Walls that mount clod by clod.

Yeah, the whole book's like that.