A collection of prison journal entries dated chronologically, which at the time of writing were never intended to be shared, Aftermath narrates the story of how the author came to be incarcerated after robbing a pharmacy, flecked with flashbacks surrounding cancer, addiction, the robbery itself and his rehabilitation, until the reclaiming of his life after the Governor of New Jersey pardoned him in January 2018.

To create a rebound story cover crafted with sensibility and which inspired hope and redemption, our cover cook took his best knife, cut through a sheet of paper —the same medium used by the author to record his personal musings— and carefully pulled the incision up to mimic an open wound. Serving as a subtle allusion to the knife event, which inflicted both emotional and psychological damage, the cut also features as a threshold that marks a before and an after by splitting the cover text in two columns. The disturbance in the cut contrasts with the delicacy of the serif typography, typeset in lower case as if they were words extracted from the pages in the diary.

On the back, the same cut appears as a healed scar on the paper. The author initially wanted to place a few journal entries as the back cover blurb, but trusted us on leaving nothing on the back but the scar to empower the open/healed wound dual concept.