Mood-board focuses…
- Ominous, doom, looming
- Space, cramping, vastness, extremes of scale
- Shattering, breaking, remolding
- Snowflakes, crystals, fractals
- Microscopic, intricate
- Cosmic, universes, seas, skies, moons
- Dust, rust, rot, disuse – a vast space that is not being used
- Rawness, elemental – fire, ice, water, dirt, building something from primary elements
- Mixing of natural and unnatural, blending of old and new
- Stretching nature to the extremes where it becomes unnatural
- Delicacy, fragility, timidity, ice, wind
- Quiet, walking through winter woods, blowing on the breeze, fresh-fallen snow
- Astronomy, spacey, extraterrestrial, otherworldly, immersion
- Seeing the unseen and yet seeing its vastness, vastness in a small space
- Progressive meditation, move from messiness and contradiction and enmeshment to resolution
- Inner proceeding to the outward, illumination from within to outside
- Pangs, coming to newness, integration, harmony
- Unbundled, unsheltered
- Encased, smashed open, growing inward
- Glacial, distance, isolation
- Specificity, sharpness, acerbic, wind-chopped, crispness
- Poems placed on the pages like snowflakes, smooth texture like glaciers
- Ecopoetics and an ecopoetic distinction with non-nature as an outlier and yet also an interconnected part of everything
Fonts…
- Something thinner, lighter, and neither too sharp nor too blunt
- Serif adds an elegant frozen feel, giving it crystal edges while also enclosing the vastness and blocking it in
- Ideas: Didot, Palatino, Syntax, Caslon, Baskerville, Sabon
- Perhaps an entangled, “handwritten,” type font for the cover
Size…
- Poems as snowflakes in the layout – and the rest of the space white
- Keeps the messy, stream of consciousness feel while keeping it focused
- Small font emphasizes the smallness
- But, larger book size emphasizes the vastness by preserving the whitespace
- Extremes – big, bold, uppercase of the title and the small lowercase of the author’s name, separated by the vastness and the divide of the whitespace
Paper…
- Something with a recycled quality but not a recycled color – more a cool undertone
- Paper that is not noisy, but if you step on it, it will crunch
- A base color with “feature sheets” – a pale blue/gray base with fibers, recycled qualities, and then a few red center sheets to vocalize the extremes (not a bright red, a dried red/orange) in a semi-circular pattern (vis-à-vis geodes, volcanoes, a wildness exploding beyond rigid control, etc.) – a “survival” feel of dried blood
Color and Cover…
- “Slightly less black” – not gray, but something navy-ish for the font
- Gradient throughout the pages – starting light and moving dark, or perhaps, starting dark and moving light
- Demarcation of “Cold” title being very dark and then fading the color of the text out from there throughout the pages of the book
- Visual of the geode on the back cover, but positioned so that its identity as a geode is ambiguous
Form of Printing…
- Letterpress imprint for the cover
- Blank impressions for line images, such as snowflakes
Edition in General…
- Overlay the poems with a frosty layer of a vellum page with images and/or Icelandic words (from the manuscript) – honoring that this book is a responsive book to a place and to a translation
- Framing the water poems by printing them in light ink on dark paper, set off from the white paper by the vellum paper of the image pages
- A simple stab binding with either blue or red string
- Icelandic as a ghost-like, backgrounding note throughout the book