Now & Then
As the sky gathers rust and ochre
from foliage crowns,
wild hair dances
on open window breezes,
a bittersweet performance
of nostalgic musings
that pulse and bleed
from a discontent mind
aching for an idyllic future.
Writing Reflection
When I first started drafting this poem, I wasn’t sure where to start but I knew I wanted to do something on the shorter side since there was limited space in the book. Eventually, I decided to write about the blurry line between past, present, and future and how they can all converge on a moment. The first few days of the drafting process were really easy for me because I knew exactly what I wanted to change each day and the images I wanted to expand upon. My very first draft arose in about fifteen minutes, so I didn’t think too hard about it initially except to establish a good starting place, and I think that helped a lot in the beginning. However, the further along I got, the harder it became to make any substantial edits to my poem because after working on it for a few days, I grew more and more attached to each new draft. It was also challenging to find a title that I liked and that avoided sounding cliche, but I think it helped that I waited until the very end to add a title because I at least had some direction to work from.
Page 1 
Page 2 
Page 3 
Front Cover 
Back Cover
Bookmaking Reflection
I choose to make the orientation of my book different from a typical book by putting the spine at the top. I wanted to have plenty of space for decoration, and I knew I was going to do a lot of cutting and gluing, so I didn’t really want to make this a more painstaking process by making each piece smaller than they ended up. The poem I wrote contains quite a bit of imagery despite being so short which really worked out for me when it came to the bookmaking part of this exercise. Seeing as it takes place in an autumn setting, I really wanted to make sure the book itself had the coziness of the season by using rich colors. The content played a huge role in how the book looks because I wanted to cement the imagery into the reader’s mind so they can see what I imagined when I was writing the poem. On the first page, I decided to lean in heavily to the fall scenery that I mentioned earlier by depicting a tree with individually cut and colored leaves. The second page relies on the movement depicted in lines 3 through 6, and with the last page, I wanted to depict the feeling of the last three lines in the poem. My hope is that I was able to blend the poem’s storytelling with the book’s creating in a way that doesn’t feel forced to the reader.
