Skip to main content

Distributed for CavanKerry Press

Reconstructing Eden

A Southern Bastard’s Lyric Journey

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.  
 

96 pages | 21 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2026

Black Studies

Poetry


CavanKerry Press image

View all books from CavanKerry Press

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

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

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press