For today, I asked poet and memoirist Nick Flynn to share his favorite covers with us. Oh so different from Don Share's choices. Whereas Don has chosen classic covers, strong, graphic, architectural, typographical covers that tilt their way towards the intertextual and the satiric, Nick has chosen covers that have no such sense of jovial calm. His three seethe with color and torqued forms. They are vexed, lush, unruly.
1. Rebecca Wolff's The King
2. D. A. Powell's Chronic.
3. Marie Howe's Kingdom of Ordinary Time.
Nick's choices may at first appear diverse, ranging from the dark, unsettling, biological (Powell), to the neo-punk, as if Vivienne Westwood inflected (Wolff) or to the vibrant, scrawly, and childlike (Howe). But they share a strong, baroque sense of pattern, and reveal themselves as a group to be what I would call late-Hellenic in style: ornate, ordered images about to burst into disorder.
Fantastic. Thanks, Nick!
And thanks to all of you for your comments...
