In her debut poetry collection, Notifications On, Emily Holland explores queer longing, digital intimacy, and the complicated ways technology shapes modern relationships. Through poems that capture the exhilaration and ache of texting, dating, and yearning in an always-online world, Holland examines what it means to seek connection when our phones are never out of reach.
Holland is the Executive Editor of Poet Lore and a genderqueer lesbian poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications. Their debut collection, Notifications On, will be published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House on January 26, 2027. It is available for pre-order now.
Debutiful is honored to reveal Notifications On‘s cover, designed by Emily Fussner, along with a Q&A with Holland about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I wouldn’t call myself too “superstitious,” but I always held a belief that it would be bad luck for me to really think too much about my “book” when I was first submitting the manuscript to contests and presses. That submission process took about four years (after a decade of writing!) and I still held fast to that idea as the rejections flowed in. The manuscript, and I, changed a lot in that process: some older poems about my family fell out, new poems exploring my own questions of gender identity came in, the title changed more than once. When I landed on Notifications On as the title during my last round of submissions, it felt like the manuscript was finally ready to become a book. So, at that point, I did start to think a little bit more towards covers, but mostly in an abstract sense and mostly in terms of what I was seeing come out of other poetry presses I love and by poets I admire. I felt particularly drawn to books like Couplets by Maggie Millner and Three Births by K Patrick, covers with bold color and text. I wanted to soak up as many ideas as I could and I could not have dreamed up this cover on my own, but that is why we are so blessed to have incredible designers (like Emily Fussner)!
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
My experience with Washington Writers’ Publishing House has been incredible. They are a one-of-a-kind press, the oldest nonprofit co-op press in the country. It is volunteer-run and each author they publish stays on to help with the future books, so it feels like joining one big family! When I got the call that Notifications On had won their annual Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, I immediately hit the ground running with potential cover ideas.
I feel very fortunate that WWPH allowed me to choose the designer for my book, which I think is just one of the many perks of working with a small, independent press. Emily Fussner is an amazing artist and designer who I’ve had the pleasure of working with since 2022 when she came on to be our designer at Poet Lore amidst our revamp of the journal. She is also an amazing artist herself, crafting incredibly moving work that brings cracks and fissures to life beneath the sun and in various site-specific installations. I trusted her to create something sharp, unique, and provocative.
I sent her my wild questionnaire from the press, which included everything from moods (introspective, anxious, yearning, but maybe a little funny?) to recurring motifs (mirrors, bodies, ghosts, phones, birds, landscapes) and larger themes (lesbian identity, genderqueerness, complications of place, digital identities).
From early talks with WWPH, we knew we wanted a striking color palette that called to mind the brightness of our digital landscapes, but still felt connected to the physical world as well. In those brainstorms, the color blue came up a lot (the glow of a phone in the dark, hues of water and the sky) and we decided to learn towards a digital/typography-heavy design with some sort of interesting background elements. I initially sent over a lot of different ideas for backgrounds, patterned pages that I found while scouring open-access images in various online collections, some exciting and vibrant like Myron Kozman’s abstract screenprinting, others, like the Bauhaus paper designs of Paul Klein and the Art Nouveau graphic designs of Otto Eckmann, with more muted color palettes.
Emily sent over a few ideas to start, some with flat, colored backgrounds and text treatment that called to mind the rounded digital “buttons” on all of our touch-screens, others with more textured backgrounds and striking moving typography. There were blues, like we discussed, but also purples, yellows, and greens. Text options in black and bold red-orange. As I looked closer at the variations she sent, I paused on one in particular, and quickly magnified my screen to a cool 150%. I needed to be closer to the image, to really see what was pulling me in. It was at this intense magnification that I recognized that Emily had used her own photo of the ground for the background of the text. This is the image that we ended up choosing for the final cover. I love how it intimately connects the cover to Emily’s larger body of work. And I can see, now, that where my early ideas leaned more towards recognizable patterns and traditional shapes, this image from Emily has allowed the cover to capture some of the wildness of the poems and the messy emotions they work through.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I wish I had better words for it, but it was truly so exciting! I remember releasing a quiet scream in my office when I opened the final file and could zoom in on all the brilliant texture and color. I feel so lucky to have the most perfect blurb excerpt from Mac Crane nestled in the space around the title. Seeing the cover helped solidify in my mind that yes, this is actually going to be a book. Somehow, in all the text editing and layout fun, I still did not give myself the moment to sit back and meditate on this transformation from in-progress manuscript to finished book. Getting this perfect cover from Emily allowed me to pause in the process and feel true joy, pride, and elation.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
With the background image, we can see slight bits of twigs and leaves among the textured elements, which acts as a visual reminder to us all to literally “touch grass,” and in the process, re-see how we interact with the digital aspects of our world, circling some of the main questions of the book. The green that we landed on to anchor the image also calls to mind some of the greens I found deep within the manuscript itself, like the greens of different landscapes or, in one notable instance, the stark green of the Duolingo owl.
Then, the typography physically embodies digital interruptions that pulse throughout the book, while also providing visual movement across the quadrants of the cover in a way that mimics the poems’ narrative flow. They rely heavily on repetitions and recursive moments to thread larger themes of queer longing and desire together. Upon seeing this typography in the earliest drafts of the cover, I knew that the layers of text were a perfect visual representation of the repetitions within the poems. Each recurrence is at once familiar, but also new. We might get a new view of the speaker in a familiar place, or a refracted look at their shifting relationship with an old lover. And as we move through these moments, we become consumed, like the speaker, by the ways they see and re-see themselves (and their desire) across these spaces. Repetition can work to queer, or subvert, what we already know. Emily’s cover design works in a similar way by juxtaposing the literal natural world of her image with the digital manipulation of the text.