Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Biolamp by Dennis James Sweeney, which will be published on April 20, 2027 by Autumn House Press. You can pre-order your copy here.
In Biolamp, Dennis James Sweeney confronts ecological collapse, technological alienation, and the lingering weight of history with startling imagination and unexpected hope.
In their sophomore collection, Sweeney’s poems inhabit a world shaped by loss and transformation, where decay becomes a source of energy, and the past remains visible in the landscapes of the present. Through dreamlike imagery and inventive language, Sweeney explores what it means to feel deeply in an era defined by environmental crisis and digital disconnection. The collection suggests that feeling itself—even dread, grief, or uncertainty—is evidence of life and a reason to continue imagining new futures.
Here’s the cover, designed by Mike Corrao, with art by Connor “Phib” Dainty:
Dennis James Sweeney: I first encountered Connor “Phib” Dainty’s collages back when Twitter was real. His collages take old-school images of nature and remix them into surreal landscapes with people passing through, and they always felt kindred with the moods of my writing. I had originally asked my editor, Christine Stroud of Autumn House Press, if we could use an image of a rainbow monolith being photographed by a tiny black and white man. Christine reached out to Phib to see if he’d be open to us using one of his pieces for the cover, and (yay!) he was.
Once we had the go-ahead, Christine had some other great suggestions of collages from Phib’s catalog, which better fit the surreal environmental landscapes of Biolamp. Designer Mike Corrao did mock-ups with several of our suggestions, and they were all beautiful. To my surprise, the one that felt like it had to be the cover used an image I hadn’t been magnetized to at first, but that I now love for the book.
The moment taught me that an image on its own is very different than the context of an image on a book cover. Corrao’s design, paired with Phib’s collage, perfectly captured the dark blossom of the book, the way its stalks are both ghostly and life-filled. And just over the horizon, I imagine, is the ocean that plays a significant role in many of the book’s poems: a sea of overwhelmingness and relief, just out of sight.
This process also reminded me of the collaborative nature of being a writer, which I’ve been thinking about ever since writing How to Submit. The conversations around the text are the text, in a certain way, and they reveal things about what I’ve written that I never would otherwise have known. Biolamp’s cover revealed to me a hunger that underlies these poems’ lushness. It reminds me who I was (the man crawling through the sand) and who I am now (among the flowers, beyond the horizon’s edge).
Mike Corrao: Designing the cover for Biolamp was a very fun challenge. The author requested we use the work of talented Minnesota-based collage artist, Connor “Phib” Dainty. And I can see why. Dainty’s work hits the mark spot-on with its tension between the earthly flora and lunar tundra. There’s a soft uncanniness to the nature depicted. And the central pull of that lone figure, standing before this surreal forest. It all felt a perfect match for Sweeney’s poetry.
The primary challenge in this design was to explore how we could integrate text into pre-existing art (a design challenge as old as time). This piece is particularly generous due to the negative space at the top and bottom of the composition, which presents a natural lead for the cover’s composition.
Pulling in some nice speckled papery textures, weaving the text through the pale foliage, I wanted to introduce the typography as another part of the collage. Text integrated into the uncanny nature of the artwork—how Sweeney’s poetry itself searches to connect what’s natural to what’s written.
This cover was a pleasure to put together.
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