Taproot - Softcover

Betty Beamguard’s account of an amazing young woman who is living a full and interesting life despite the crippling effects of cerebral palsy is skillfully written and well-reported. Heather’s story, along with those of the many generous friends who have helped her, will provide hope to many, and inspiration to us all. —Marcia Preston author of The Butterfly House, The Piano Man, and more.

Sense-embedded, peeled to perceptive freshness, with a gift for the muscular and concentrating phrase, Indigo Moor’s first book engages not only family and personal history, but the broader culture’s as well. These are poems weighted with the real world, consequential, revelatory, and moving. Jane Hirshfield * * * * * * * * * * “The vivid, dexterous work of Yusef Komunyakaa and Jean Toomer’s crisp, poignant Cane come to mind, but Indigo Moor is, finally, his own man. His intricate, breathtaking poetry is lushly musical and allusive, alive, inventive--a muscular jazz. In his impressive debut, Tap-Root, Indigo Moor is both dazzlingly cosmopolitan and down home in the same breath--simultaneously drenched in opera’s ornate cascades, the blues, and the blue jay’s song: a son of the South and a son of the universe!” Cyrus Cassells   * * * * * * * * * * The crucible of the past is relentless, Indigo Moor tells us in one poem, and in another, “The Better Truth,” that the mind stores that part of history that glimmers. Both are true in his debut collection, Tap-Root. These are poems that tremble and ache with urgency as Moor longs for, returns to, leaves behind, and elegizes his South—a landscape of hardship, beauty, work, and the sweet music forged out of survival.Natasha Trethewey