Overview

Combining unsettling imagery with inventive form, this powerful collection explores the inner struggle to resist violence. In Reconstructing Eden, Indigo Moor performs an exorcism of a childhood shaped by the dizzying racism that once drove him to the brink of murder. Using a poetic form that Moor calls jazz triptych—a tercet followed by a nonstandard villanelle, followed by a rhyme royal stanza—the book is a stunning rendering of a Black child moving through life with a smoldering anger emerging within him. Only through an incredibly violent act while deployed in Operation Desert Storm does the author realize the murderous intent in his heart. Through his lyrical poetry, he begins to cleanse himself.

Full Product Details

Author:   Indigo Moor
Publisher:   CavanKerry Press
Imprint:   CavanKerry Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.172kg
ISBN:  

9781960327185

ISBN 10:   1960327186
Pages:   96
Publication Date:   03 March 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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Table of Contents

I. Second Birthing Rebirth Through Anger During Desert Storm Storm Years II. Complicated Endings Sleep Twinned Bastards Ties Trust Unwrapped Dear Mother My Mother, Theresa Forgotten My Personal Man o’ War My Son in the Mirror Stance Fear of Violence Southern White Saints They Are Still Muscled in My Head Training Day Bussing Black Degrees of Hate How We Came to Be The Inner Works III. The Trifling Years Lost in Fields Death As Another Name For Love Shaping Cartoon Dreams How Black Was That Flower? Reliving the Future Remembrance Whistlin’ The New South Broken Like Cane Underdog: The Shoe-Shiner Speaks Master and Slave The Search Handcuffed to the Past What We Remembered The Almighty’s Microscope Between Drowning Risen from Soil What I Bring with Me Lamp IV. Unsettled Beginnings Country Emblem Our New Home Shipboard, I Dream of College Reflections Mail Drop Symbols Hearts Fluttering Bombing Iraq Dirt Clods Tonguing Uncle Sam A Break from the Deck Cards at Play A Knife Through Magic How I Never Killed Myself Forgiveness The Ethnic Absence Different Pain for the Same Country Divorce Carthage & Anarchy My War Grinds to a Beginning X-Man

Reviews

This is a deeply American book in the Whitmanesque sense: “This is no book; who touches this, touches a man.” Indigo Moor has rendered his life in these pages with an uncommon thoroughness, a combination of haunting graphics with formally inventive yet demotic poetry that tells of someone who has come through a number of storms and emerged with a complex tale that is unflinching yet tender, clear-headed yet passionate, always alert to miscreant death and stubborn life. As with Whitman, this very much is a book, one whose sheer existence, as it speaks so vividly and acutely of the poet’s life and times, is cause for celebration. Score one for art. This is the real thing.   -- Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel An inventive, evocative memoir in verse. Indigo Moor taps multiple veins that shape, animate, and haunt his complicated relationship to the South. “I look for ways to mend/my South. To strain my ghosts./Leave my future something to diagnose.” Dense and thundering, Moor’s poems stir us with their fierceness, tenderness, and frankness.   -- Luisa M. Giulianetti, author of Agrodolce Indigo Moor's gorgeously written, sometimes brutal, poems continue to haunt me after reading them: a series of brilliantly rendered jazz solos on manhood, fatherhood, brotherhood, war, Blackness, childhood, the sheer stark joy and horror of being human and alive. Unforgettable, unsettling and profound.   -- Liz Hand, author of The Haunting of Hill House

Author Information

Indigo Moor is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sacramento. His books include Everybody's Jonesin' for Something, Through the Stonecutter's Window, Tap-Root, and In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers. Moor taught as visiting faculty for Dominican University's MFA program.

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