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When I asked the artist, Douglas Jones, if he could come up with an illustration depicting evil overcome by good, within the context of the plot for the cover of my new book; I knew it was a tall order. Well, what you see is what I got; and you don't mess with the art of an artist without the probability of dire consequences, so I decided to set with it for a while. By the time I did call him, I'd grown to appreciate what he'd done and, being a writer, I asked him if he could put some words to the conceptual figure he'd drawn. He stated, unequivocally, that there was nothing, even remotely, conceptual regarding his work and that he had clearly fulfilled my request. The illustration on the cover is a highly expressionistic representative portrait of the Ocean Front Mall, and a representation of the primordial struggle between good and evil. The Toy Store, within the mall, is the cancerous heart, circumscribed and protected by the Demon, Samael; the 'Fallen Angel of Death,' who periodically attempts embodiment through the current property owner of the mall. Jon Sadler is presented with a journal revealing the history of the mall and four generations of related owners. The journal introduces Jon to an enigmatic character, by the name of "Preacher." The Preacher offers a riddle in the form of an incomplete symbol, the solution of which promises and end to the curse on the Ocean Front Mall.

Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His work has focused on modern and contemporary American poetry, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies and deaf studies. His books on poetics include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His work in disability studies includes Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford U Press, 2019) and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error (New York U Press, 2022). He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002).