“Existential Bread,” a book by the poet and amateur baker Jim Franks, is only sort of about bread.

“It’s not a cookbook,” the poet Jim Franks said about his new book, “Existential Bread.”

To dispel any confusion, here’s what readers won’t find in its pages: photos of backlit loaves of bread or of disembodied hands measuring, dusting and kneading. There are no recipes. It’s about bread baking, but only insofar as bread baking is a metaphor for life.

“Bread making is instinctual, if you can learn to listen to that wonderful sense within us all that tells us how to make something else feel good,” Mr. Franks writes in the first chapter.

Meditations like these are formatted in stanzas with simple line drawings peppered throughout. Another twist is the book’s publisher: Drag City, an independent music label in Chicago. (In its three decades, the label has done only a couple dozen books.)

“As a format

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