Reconstructing Eden: A Southern Bastard’s Lyric Journey

Coming March 3rd, 2026 - Books will ship the final week of February
Preorder now!

Told in what the author calls Jazz Triptych (a tercet followed by a "Bastard Villanelle," followed by a Rhyme Royal), Indigo Moor harnesses the anger within himself to perform an exorcism of the childhood that led him inching toward murder in the dizzying racism of his life. Reconstructing Eden is a stunning rendering of a Black child moving through life with anger being an unknown phoenix rising in him. Only through an incredibly violent act during Desert Storm does he realize the murderous intent in his heart. Through his lyrical poetic writing, he begins to cleanse himself.

Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sacramento, Indigo Moor has written four previous poetry collections. His first and third books, Tap-Root and In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers, were published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. His second, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His fourth book, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, is a multigenre work consisting of poetry, short fiction, memoir, and stage plays that took second place in the University of Nebraska Press’s Backwater Prize. Indigo has taught as visiting faculty in the MFA program at Dominican University of California. 

from During Desert Storm

In The End: I lift him above the flight deck like a charm.
Ready to cast this seed into the dark loam of sea-flecked night.
An Iraqi plane bursts overhead. The Deck Chief’s alarmed

voice: CLEAR THE FLIGHT DECK! Two F14s flash
over rumbling A6s. Fleeing shipmates fight
through shrapnel. Once more, heaven crashes

down on us. I’m scared shitless. The hatch to my shop
closing in front of me like a wounded mouth. I might
make it. But hands on the door work to slam it, chop

my fingers off. This other man straining to lock me out
isn’t Black, did I mention that? Does it matter?

*****

from Different Pain for the Same Country

A plane climbs colored clouds, seeking calmer
air. Then drops 300 feet, the pilot’s stomach
sinking with it. This is how it is to love America.

My sister says grass grew thicker this year.
That maybe some American soil might pluck
sense from my descent. How to explain the fear

of falling up through your own country?
I say your body, not mine, is fucked
by this history you call godly.

I lost seasons raising crops with no name.
Anything this long in the ground is roughed,
bound to grow stunted and blamed.

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

Reconstructing Eden is 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 and sometimes brutal poems continue to haunt me after reading them: a series of brilliantly rendered jazz solos on manhood, fatherhood, brotherhood, war, Blackness, childhood, and the sheer stark joy and horror of being human and alive. Unforgettable, unsettling, and profound.

—Liz Hand, author of The Haunting of Hill House

96 pages
Indigo Moor
Pub date – March 2026
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-18-5
Notable Voices - Poetry