With the release of Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap this week, the Lookout team has been reflecting on how each book project affords us new opportunities to translate words on the page into artful and lasting conversations.
For us, promotional kits not only help generate excitement for a forthcoming book, but they also contextualize and enlarge the discussion around it. They include, of course, early reading copies and details about the book, but we always try to create fun items to remind recipients how deeply we invest in each author and title. Over the past few semesters, students in UNCW’s MFA and BFA publishing programs have worked with book practicum instructor and publisher Emily Smith to curate A Love Tap promotions with thoughtfulness and care.
To support A Love Tap, Lookout staff designed handmade bookmarks to accompany each galley. Beaded in Mardi Gras colors, the bookmark is adorned with a hand-illustrated acrylic fox charm, drawing inspiration from Wade’s poems and nodding to the beautiful custom pendants that often decorate the necklaces of Mardi Gras krewes.
BFA alumna Nitya Budamagunta, who came up with the idea of the fox charm when taking the spring 2025 Lookout class, explains that landing on the fox was, in large part, a collaborative process among staff in the practicum. Possibilities for the charm included resonant images from the book: a crow inspired by “Another (Damn) Crow Poem,” an unlit match, and a silhouette honoring Lucille Clifton—one of Wade’s literary influences—but the team ultimately landed on the fox, an image that recurs in the poems “dear fox” and “the coming of fox.” Bookending the collection, the poems reflect on the speaker’s relationships with family.
“Though Wade writes about all kinds of relationships—to New Orleans, to lovers and friends, to his mother—it’s his father he most returns to,” Ross Wade writes in his foreword to A Love Tap, “probably because it’s the most vexing of those relationships.” Gay says that “dear fox” and “the coming of fox” are the poems he returns to most. “The stories, what we’ve been told, what we’ve inherited, what we’ve been given, are illuminated, and transformed, by what is unknowable. In these cases, visitation by foxes who are, or at least invoke, the poet’s father and his grandmother. These poems shimmer in strange and yearning light. It’s beautiful and apt that Wade’s fox poems are after Lucille Clifton’s—of course they are—for who better to help us attend to the unknowable. To help us regard what we cannot understand. Which maybe is why we come to poems in the first place. And maybe why poetry comes to us.”
As Nitya began designing, she first sought stock imagery of a fox but quickly realized that none captured the style and tone of Wade’s poems. The fox in his poems is unknowable, fleeting, while the clip art she found felt overly cute. She wanted the charm to evoke Mardi Gras, but she also needed to avoid cliché. The resulting charm draws inspiration from the detailed style of Mardi Gras masks, incorporating the fleur-de-lis and a few feathers in purple, green, and gold.
Nitya’s personal history as an artist also inspired the process and materials. She’s been making jewelry since she was twelve, and over time, has experimented a lot. “Among my favorite things are bookmarks made out of fishing line and beads,” she says. “The string becomes an invisible marker inside the pages.” Although we ultimately opted for ribbon instead of fishing line, Nitya notes, “I love how it pops with the purple and green beads!”
At the heart of the design is an image from “Faith or another way of being,” the opening poem in A Love Tap. In it, Wade writes of “a rosary strung together with Mardi Gras beads.” Nitya says, “I love how this line builds the initial sense of place in the collection.” It introduces Wade’s concerns and obsessions. It was a pivotal image the team kept coming back to as we brainstormed ideas for this project. “This bookmark is neither a rosary nor is it a representation of the festival, but I hope that readers continue to use the bookmark long after finishing the book,” she says, “thinking of A Love Tap along the way.”
Stay tuned to our social media for ways that you could win your own fox charm bookmark! We hope that you’ll order a copy of A Love Tap from us, or pick one up from your favorite bookshop. And if you’d like to be added to our media list for future ARC mailings, please reach out directly to Publisher Emily Smith.