The Next Country

The Next Country is a new collection of poetry by Idra Novey.

From the publisher: "In these powerful lyric poems, Idra Novey’s exploration of “country” extends beyond national boundaries into the countries of marriage and family, history and the unspoken, leading to a bold and imaginative reckoning of the self with the larger world."

To help convey this sensibility, the publisher used a piece by Matthew Cusick as the cover art. Cusick recycles old maps into this work.

From a 2006 exhibit at the Lisa Dent Gallery in San Francisco:

Matthew Cusick's newest paintings are a series of Texas highways traversing allegorical landscapes. For his second exhibition at Lisa Dent Gallery, Cusick has refined his technique of painting with maps, using them as a surrogate for paint - their inherent visual qualities of tone, value, and density employed to render the spatial image of the highways.

More examples of his cartographic art at: GeoCarta and Creative Mapping.

HT to La Gringissima