I’ve had the pleasure of creating covers for two chapbooks of John Roche’s delightful and thoughtful Joe Poems. Joe is a poem-scribbling, gender-shifting persona who contains multitudes and wanders space and time.

For the first book, the author suggested something southwestern, so Joe is depicted wandering through a desert landscape. For Joe Rides Again, Joe is shown traversing the surface of a Mars-like planet - an echo of the red southwestern landscape, and a reflection of how Joe and his travels have expanded significantly. I wanted to evoke something of the type of illustrated sci-fi covers that feature imagined landscapes.