This is a poetry collection about the cruelty of life in Sioux Lookout - northern Ontario. It deals with racial injustice and what happens to the under privileged when the modern world oppresses people and the environment. The challenge for me was to find of way of representing environmental degradation, with its impact on people, it a new way, without resorting to visual tropes, such as a photograph of a clear cut.

This is a poetry cover design for McGill-Queen’s University Press, as part of their Hugh Maclennan Poetry Series. There was a line in the brief for this project that was the initial impetus for the first series of sketches: “The collection frequently uses nature as an artery to transport the reader on a metaphoric river through a landscape of emotions. Whatever the feeling, whatever the season, the poems are full of water: rain, river, lake, gulf, ocean.” I am sure I am not the only cover designer who has a relatively extensive collection of rejected cover designs. I refer to them as my “salon des refusés”. This cover design took its starting point from an unused poetry cover sketch I had done a while back - The Stream Exposed with All its Stones for Véhicule Press. Both titles feature streams or rivers. For that earlier cover I was intrigued by having veins in an arm be a visual metaphor for a river. I felt this could be an opportunity to explore the idea further.