A stunning poetic narrative about a painter and his lover living on a former Southern slave plantation

Wild 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’s novel, Wild Indigo is written in the tradition of verse narratives such as Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know. Dreamy and uneasy, somber and erotic, Wild Indigo asks what it means to make art—and to make a life—on contested ground, where beauty and violence are bound together.