Andrew Chi Keong Yim’s The Ninth Island is a poetry collection about displacement, inheritance, and the search for home, following his family from Hawaiʻi to Las Vegas while reaching across generations to his Chinese American great-grandmother.
Yim is a poet and teacher whose work explores family, place, and the forces that shape Hawaiʻi and its diaspora. The Ninth Island will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on February 9, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Ninth Island, designed by Alex Wolfe with photography by Patrick Nevada. Below, Yim discusses images of Hawaiʻi, Las Vegas’s culture of facsimile, and how an empty pair of car seats came to capture the book’s themes of absence, longing, and displacement.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
While writing this book, I knew I wanted any future cover to engage in some way the idea of facsimile. In writing about displacement and my changing relationship to home, I thought a lot about images that evoke Hawaiʻi, that conjure memories of home but of course can never fully bring me back there, like the seatcover in this photo does. There’s a simultaneous ache and deep well of love that I feel when confronted with those sorts of images in my day-to-day life. Las Vegas, where my family have ended up, also happens to be a city that leans all the way into facsimile to the nth degree as an ethos, from the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and the Empire State Building all sharing a skyline to being Hawaiʻi’s “Ninth Island”. I also knew I wanted to work with my childhood friend, Patrick Nevada, on the cover art. I’ve always admired his photography and when I first got the email with my book offer from Pitt I called him immediately while in the middle of a run, extremely sweaty on a sidewalk somewhere in Queens, to see if he’d do it.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Working with Alex on the cover design was a real joy. Patrick and I met up to comb through nearly a hundred photo options and I ended up sending Alex my two favorites. Alex’s design process was very collaborative and he welcomed my feedback and my many emails full of font ideas, some of which I sent his way under subject lines like “cover font?” I really wanted to work with Vegas font inspirations, incorporating ideas like clashing fonts, neons, and warm and vibrant colors. I think Alex really nailed it with that. The shaping of the title font is inspired by the signage on the California Hotel and Casino, which was the first hotel in Las Vegas to actively market to visitors from Hawaiʻi, and the font that my name is in is meant to evoke the kind of font you might see on a t-shirt or boardshorts at your local surf shop.
We also played around with the cover and book dimensions to get the composition of the photo right, and ended up going with a slightly wider-than-usual format. It was very important to me that both the car door and the second empty car seat be in frame, putting it in conversation with covers like DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS by Bad Bunny, Nostalgia, Ultra by Frank Ocean, Assembled Audience by Erika Meitner, and Inheritance by Taylor Johnson. Where a single empty seat is just a single empty seat, two become a stand-in for figures and their absence, as well as implying a relationship. I love a car as cover image, even though I don’t drive. It gives the sense that you’re going to be taken somewhere as a reader. My step-dad is a mechanic and car imagery brings me contradictory feelings of safety and precarity, because my family lived behind a lot of salvaged cars that my step-dad fixed when they were experiencing housing instability on Oʻahu.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I was like, “Yes! Yes! EXACTLY! YES!” Which was pretty weird because I’m a high school teacher and I was just sitting in the teachers’ lounge. Alex knocked it out of the park and I love the way text and image interact on this cover. This image feels like something pulled straight out of the poems in The Ninth Island, even though it isn’t. I saw this cover option and thought, “Yeah, there it is. That’s my book.”
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
I think this cover conveys the book’s themes of absence, longing, and displacement boldly but without hitting you over the head with it. It mirrors the range of the poems, some quiet and still, others maximalist and full of motion. There’s a dramatic context to the photograph that implies a story well beyond the image, a story of a driver and passenger who are not home but are trying in small ways to hold on, to remember it. That car may take them someplace nearer to or further from it. They may find some unexpected homes along the way. This book is full of love poems to Hawaiʻi and Las Vegas; this cover brings them both to bear with such harmony, and I’m so grateful to Patrick and Alex for their work on it.