Colby Cotton’s debut poetry collection, Steelhead, is a meditation on grief, loneliness, and the lasting impact of loss. Written in the aftermath of a childhood friend’s death by suicide, the collection moves through dreamlike landscapes where the boundaries between life and the afterlife blur, exploring the search for a home we can never truly return to.
Cotton is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Originally from New York, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Steelhead, designed by Alex Wolfe and featuring photography by Francisco Gonzalez Camacho. Below, Cotton discusses the rural landscapes that shaped his poems, the photograph that immediately resonated with him, and how a simple ripple in water captures the collection’s exploration of grief, memory, and mortality.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
As I was writing the book, I was acutely aware of the aesthetics that define the poems in the project. The collection is populated by the rural landscape in which I grew up and is haunted by the death of my dear childhood friend who took his own life. Although the poems feature prominently in this setting, a unique feature of the work is how the poems are in opposition to this place and the landscape doesn’t provide easy comfort, catharsis, or understanding that one might expect of the pastoral. When I thought of creating the cover, I thought that I would pursue something that would feel a bit disembodied: an animal glowing in the forest, a pair of undefined figures receding into a factory, something that would loudly pronounce a particular strategy rather than the impetus for the poems. With this photograph, I ultimately landed somewhere that more closely matches the emotional center of the collection.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your
publishing team?
From the moment I joined Pitt, everyone spoke highly of Alex Wolfe, the designer, and I quickly learned why. After spending so long in the dark writing the collection, it felt incredible to have not only Alex, but an incredible team of people to work alongside. As we began the process, Alex asked for images that I thought would speak to the work, and to my delight we immediately gravitated towards this image by one of my favorite photographers, Francisco Gonzalez Camacho, titled “A Drop in the Water”. Since we both agreed on the photograph, we didn’t have to go back and forth very long before we landed on a font and size. I was really pleasantly surprised by how easy the process was. People really do judge a book by its cover! And I’m incredibly grateful to Alex for doing such tasteful work and grateful to Francisco for lending his image to us.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
When I woke up to the cover designs from Alex, there was a feeling of immediate recognition. After so many years of close calls with this book and so many people in my life insisting that I was right to keep going, it felt like I had finally uncovered what had been waiting for me all along. It’s true, you really do know it when you see it, when landing on a cover.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
To me, “A Drop in the Water” uses ordinary imagery to evoke the infinite. Although we have all seen a ripple in the water millions of times, what I think Francisco does is allow us to see it as if it is the first, or perhaps the last time. What I hope to achieve in the book is a sense that the veil between this world and the afterlife is really quite thin, and it can be touched. Although that reality can be unsettling, it also allows for a greater sense of recognition in what we love and what we need to cling to while there is still time. In the image, I’m reminded of Franz Wright, who said: “I made the decision to dwell/ from now on/ in the hour of my death/ (the space I took up here/ scarlessly closing like water)”. Yes, I am still here, I’m alive, it’s going away, and I am grateful.