The official cover revealed in the collection's post.
Unbalance is a collection of poetry by Matthew Little published on Facebook September 11, 2017
The cover Little designed for the collection as it was posted on his Tumblr blog while still under its original name.
The collection was first announced in April 2015, but Little had been posting poems and snippets of the material to be featured in the book since December 2014. The collection was originally titled Breaking Through, but at an unspecified time Little changed it.
About[]
In October 2014 Little had published a short collection of poetry Ribbons after continuously working on it for almost a year. Just days after, Little began to write and then publish online the violent short horror story Breaking Water, which to his surprised was praised by friends and acquaintances of his, while Ribbons went almost unnoticed.
Between the months of November and March Little juggled between writing his novels as well as his poetry. In December Little wrote the poem "A Rich Man Wanted Me" and posted it on his Tumblr blog [1], leaving it in an untitled document on his computer which would later become Breaking Through. The poem itself came about from Little wishing to explore his sexual side, getting inspiration from the works of Anne Sexton, predominantly her poem "For My Lover Returning To His Wife".
A few more poems followed dealing with the subject of sex and dating. During that time the collection was originally titled Things I Think About In Bed And In The Morning. But on April 2, 2015, Little posted on Facebook that he had a dream the night before about his future poetry book, where he held it in his hands and saw that its title was "Breaking Through". He then took the dream as a sign and decided to go with that title instead.
On January 31, 2016, Little announced that so far Breaking Through was "25 poems long", and that 24 of the poems are new, while one poem comes from his Ribbons release.[1]
Cover and title change[]
On August 15, 2015, Little posted on Tumblr a cover he designed on Microsoft Paint, similar to the one he had made for Ribbons. [2] The cover features a picture of Little sitting at a beach on Cape Cod, shirtless and wearing sunglasses, taken by his boyfriend James. The picture sits centered over a blue backdrop filtered with the blue from the sky behind Little, which is accompanied by a simple text of the title and tagline.
Little liked the idea of having himself posing shirtless on the cover, writing "I guess I like it because I show some skin in it, I appear confident while surrounded by a confident place where people go shirtless and display themselves or stay clothed and ashamed. I’ve always displayed myself, especially in my writings" He then asked his followers if they'd buy the book if it looked like that, and some said yes, while a few said they didn't care for its design.
Sometime before its release it was retitled Unbalanced. The original title originally fascinated Little because for one it came from a dream and also because he thought the collection was going to be larger and be his subsequent "breath through" into the mainstream literary world. However, he decided instead that the poems presented in the collection weren't his brightest or even best, so he went with a different name, which to him describes the poetry as all being uneven, with each piece going in vastly different directions during a two-year period of time.
The official cover unveiled during its release consists of a photo taken by Little in the winter of 2012 of a dying bush among a backdrop of snow-covered ground.