“There’s nothing scarier than [someone saying], ‘this book is not going to sell with that cover,’” Strick says. “So any initial love kind of gets pushed aside.”
She was crushed (as are the people who still reach out to her to this day to ask where they can get the complete set). But the whole episode underscores a larger fact that I’ve come to believe after writing about book covers for years—killed covers are often where you can find the really great stuff. The surprising work. The refreshingly genre-breaking, exciting, unfiltered output that nudges the field toward its next evolution.
Poetry can act only as a physical charm. It’s made up of a host of details that cannot be distinguished instantly. If this were not the case, then it would be impossible to expect anyone with concerns of their own to venture into the labyrinth of a style, to explore its every recess, and to lose themselves in it.
When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.
Could there be a more fitting tribute to a person—especially to a writer—than seeing that connection, light and dark, and putting it all down on paper? I’d urge anyone upset about the idea of this gorgeous, sad memoir—as I admit I was at first—to read the book. You certainly can’t be more upset that this book exists than Butler himself is. He writes that he has tried to accept that “chaos felt more like home to her than happiness,” that “her higher highs could only fund the lower lows, continuously preserving her grim worldview with the idea that anything not rotten to its core must be a lie.” And then he adds: “But how about you go ahead and try and get that through your head about your partner, the central pinion in your life?”