Reconstructing Eden

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.

• I. Second Birthing Rebirth Through AngerDuring Desert StormStorm YearsII. Complicated Endings SleepTwinned BastardsTiesTrust UnwrappedDear MotherMy Mother, TheresaForgottenMy Personal Man o’ WarMy Son in the MirrorStanceFear of ViolenceSouthern White SaintsThey Are Still Muscled in My HeadTraining Day Bussing BlackDegrees of HateHow We Came to BeThe Inner WorksIII. The Trifling Years Lost in FieldsDeath As Another Name For LoveShapingCartoon DreamsHow Black Was That Flower?Reliving the FutureRemembranceWhistlin’The New SouthBroken Like CaneUnderdog: The Shoe-Shiner Speaks Master and SlaveThe SearchHandcuffed to the Past What We RememberedThe Almighty’s MicroscopeBetween DrowningRisen from SoilWhat I Bring with Me Lamp IV. Unsettled Beginnings Country EmblemOur New Home Shipboard, I Dream of College ReflectionsMail DropSymbols Hearts Fluttering Bombing Iraq Dirt Clods Tonguing Uncle SamA Break from the Deck Cards at Play A Knife Through MagicHow I Never Killed Myself Forgiveness The Ethnic AbsenceDifferent Pain for the Same Country Divorce Carthage & AnarchyMy War Grinds to a Beginning X-Man

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.