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.