Poetry Book Design: "The Jewish King" by Alex Averbuch

The Jewish King is a powerful and timely poetry book that confronts the reader with issues of racism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance.

The front cover display an image of Alex's great uncle from his maternal grandmother's side merging (or transitioning) to an image of his maternal grand father on the back. By doing so I tried to show the violence of this so called "artificial" blend that brought to the creation of the poet him self. The title of the book is presented on a censorship mark (from part two of the book) that silencing the boy on the front cover, to give an idea of what to expect inside.

The book is divided to three part, mixing the poet's individual family's conflicts and Ukraine's national history. In order to provide maximum respect to the text I minimizing the design and avoided unnecessary graphic elements, too noticeable fonts and large page number size from interfering with the smooth reading of the poems.

One extreme design choice you can see in the book was the decision to stretch one of the poems on two spreads with no spaces, this was done by Averbuch to overwhelm the reader. In the design of the spread we created a pattern effect from the poem's words to challenge the reader and make it look endless.