Silk road cover design

Silk Road is a collection of poems written in the persona of Donata Badoer, the wife of Marco Polo, who observes a newly connected world while attending to her everyday activities. In unbidden moments, she turns to perceive the economics and erotics of contact between the people of Europe and China, recognizing both tensions and camaraderie in their links across the globe. Daneen Wardrop is the author of seven books, including three collections of poetry: The Odds of Being, Cyclorama, and most recently Life as It, which received the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. - courtesy of Etruscan Press

The image featured, The Polos Leave Venice from Li Livres du Graunt Caam 1400, Johannes (courtesy The Bodleian Library, Oxford), provided inspiration for the author and so it was important to integrate the image into the cover design. As the image tells a story, it felt only appropriate to embed the title into a portion of the image, to further unify the the story and image.