I was asked to design the cover for a book of poems called Gut Atlas. A title like that invites a certain kind of madness, and I was lucky enough that the publisher handed me the keys to the kingdom—no rules, no limitations, just the endless horizon of creative freedom. You would think that such freedom would be a gift, and in many ways, it was. But freedom, after all, is a double-edged sword.

The real challenge lay not in the design itself, but in understanding the heart of the book. What did it want to say? What did it demand to be? It was in a conversation with the author, Ken Ishikawa, that the answer began to take shape. Ken, a poet with fire in his soul, shared with me that as a young man, he had set himself a daunting task: to write the poem that would destroy the world. A poem that would tear apart the fabric of the reader’s understanding, shattering everything they thought they knew. It was an idea he had inherited, in part, from the late Cirilo Bautista, who had spoken of every writer needing to craft a work so powerful it would undo the world as it is in the reader’s mind.

That, I realized, was the key. A cover for a book that held such ambition must carry the same weight. It must, in its own way, destroy and rebuild. It must echo the rawness of language, the chaos of thought, the unraveling of the familiar. And so, the design began to emerge, a reflection of the very challenge Ken had set for himself in his poems: to break the world, and in its breaking, make it new.