The image to the left is similar to the cover of David Peak's Museum of Fucked, from Warm Milk Printing Press, but not exactly how the chapbook looks. The artwork, by Truett Dietz, is the same, but the fonts and placement of the wording is slightly off.
I don't know if this will be the plan with all of their chapbooks or not, but Warm Milk's aesthetic for this particular chapbook is a nice, clean approach. The cover is pretty simple, a drawing and simply the title and author's names. The back is blank minus the publisher's name, in small lettering.
Inside is similar - a sturdier, colored sheet of paper stands in as an end paper and then the 24 pages of print themselves, covering 14 works from Peak, again with fairly small print and just a simple, straightforward design.
This design fits Peak's writing to a tee. His sentences are stripped to nearly nothing as he writes about what seems to be one constant place, and not a pretty place at that. Peak's writing observes those that we tend to try to ignore whenever we're confronted with them - the guy in a wheelchair, legs missing; the panhandler rooting through garbage cans hoping for a couple of returnables or some tossed food; those wandering the projects; etc. It's not overly comforting reading, but it's also pretty fascinating.
This book was published in a limited run of 50. As of about two weeks ago, per a conversation at The Constant Conversation (The weblog of The Quarterly Conversation), they were down to about six. I'd go look for one of those six asap!



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