J Brooke is the award-winning queer documentary Out Late. They are also Prose Reviews Editor at The Rumpus, and a previous Nonfiction Editor for Stonecoast Review. They received their MFA from the University of Southern Maine, and their work has been nominated for a 2025 Pushcart, a 2025 Best of The Net, and “HYBRID” (their autobiographical essay on gender) won Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Award.
In their debut poetry collection, I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side, Brooke takes readers on a journey from a tightly controlled, gendered childhood in elite New York spaces to a self-defined nonbinary adulthood that resists societal expectations and erasure. While exploring amily dynamics, body dysmorphia, class performance, and queer becoming, Brooke interrogates how identity is seen, misseen, and claimed.
Debutiful is very excited to reveal the cover for the collection, which was designed by Sally Franckowiak, along with a Q&A with Brooke about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I did… I’m a huge fan of great photography and photographers, and I had always imagined photography on the cover. While literally, I was THRILLED when Driftwood picked up the book for myriad editorial and taste reasons, I had to shift because this particular press (known for their unique covers) favors illustration.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
It was more inclusive than I had imagined. The publisher, James, really wanted to make sure I was comfortable and that was significant, because I have peers who had regaled me with nightmare stories of presses moving ahead unilaterally. So my editor, Sarah, and I worked together to create a list of icons from my poems that the illustrator could work from. The illustrator sent back various rough thumbnails, and I was able to choose and add things. I was comfortable with the final image when it was handed over to the designer, but I was ABSOLUTELY BLOWN AWAY when I saw what Sally did with it in the completed design – she added an underlying element, gave the background a defining color and treatment I would never have imagined, and did something to the back cover treatment which is just so inspired. I had zero change requests when I saw the design— at that point any tweaking was between editorial and PR departments re where blurbs etc fit.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
In case someone doesn’t read the above paragraph (I mean these days everyone skims everything…) I repeat:
ABSOLUTELY BLOWN AWAY
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The book is a themed collection of poems regarding my trans/nonbinary gender journey. Clothing and body perception are a major theme the speaker in these poems chews on throughout. The cover image captures this— the baseball cap and loose button down and sunglasses are a uniform that speaks to how the dysmorphic often sartorial mask themselves in order to move about this planet with some degree of comfort. The absenting of any defining characteristics of an actual human form beneath this uniform is intentional— it is the point. The underlying pieces behind the image, how the background orange is a solid (non-gender-allied) color but is broken up into multiple fragments, is a subtle but spot-on underscore; there’s no doubt as puzzle pieces they fit together to comprise a whole, but the fissures running between each piece are deep and permanent, like scar tissue… they exist in proximity to each other forming the fabric of an entirely new creation.