Here's the image KG and I foresee as primary:
Bird = Poet in Song, in Yiddish, get it. We also like this one, simply for its beauty:
I think the "primer" is a good concept for Tom's manuscript because at first glance there's something wonderfully, grossly literal about the kinds of translation that are happening in these poems -- which on further reading reveal themselves to be funny (funny ha ha) and complex, very human forms of non-equivalence between Yiddish and the American idiom. All of which infused imho with genuine vulnerability, a rare quality in contemporary experimental poetry. Anyway, what I find there is not at all unlike the equivalence Beyder's primer poses between Yiddish and Russian letters, which conceals the complex and sometimes fraught situations underlying. Plus these are beautiful, eye-catching illustrations, very much like the watercolor realism I remember from my own early schooling -- so there's an element of personal sense (sensation) in the project too. And, as KG just pointed out, you get to learn some Yiddish just by looking at the cover!
