Wild Indigo: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

A stunning poetic narrative about a painter and his lover living on a former Southern slave plantationWild Indigo is a remarkable poetic debut-a lyric narrative set on a former slave plantation in rural Louisiana, where love, art, and history exert competing claims.The speaker, a Black painter, has inherited the house from his white grandmother-a bequest that offers solitude and space for his creative work but also forces him to confront the trauma of slavery.His male lover, troubled by the morality of inhabiting such a place, believes the property is deepening his own depression.As the couple reckons with the lover’s mental state, Korey Williams’s poems trace a mounting tension between legacy and refusal, creation and complicity.As the story unfolds, Wild Indigo moves through a variety of poetic forms, from the sonnet to haibun, maintaining at once a powerful narrative momentum and the compression and musicality of lyric. Mixing elements of Southern Gothic and the genre of the artist’