Reconstructing Eden

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 A Haunting on the