ISBN: 979-8-9860369-1-5

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 220

Pub Date: October 10, 2023

In its three meditations—Mood Indigo, Brilliant Corners and Air Time—Indigo Angel takes its lead from different jazz modalities as these ray out into other arts, the natural world and human history. In serial prose and poetry septets that begin again and again, Jeanne Heuving explores ecologies of being, indexing the possibilities and impossibilities of becoming angel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeanne Heuving is a writer and scholar. She was the 2022 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry, Cambridge University (UK). Heuving's The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series (University of Alabama Press 2016). Her cross genre book Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic. Other books include Transducer (Chax 2008), and Omissions Are Not Accidents:  Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore (Wayne State, 1992). She is the editor of Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on His Work (U of Iowa Press, 2021), and the co-editor, along with Tyrone Williams, of Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry (Recencies Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2019).

Heuving is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Science program at the University of Washington (UW) Bothell and is on the graduate faculty in the English Department at UW Seattle. She founded the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at UW Bothell and served as its first director. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Simpson Humanities Center, and the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Indigo Angel by Jeanne Heuving

$30.00

Indigo Angel is a book of many: many voices, many points of departure, many ways of living and communing—all elemental and belonging to the complex, wondrous disaster that is human history, but also all in search of new forms, new contexts, new impulses for being subjects in time, new ways of understanding time. In this three-part meditation on what feels like everything, Jeanne Heuving builds intricate, playful, and deftly articulated passages, corners, moods for our unraveling. An immense reading experience.
The score is the written—a list of appropriated sources, the notes, is listed—and Jeanne Heuving plays upon, plays under, her instrument, the pen with which she begins, dragging it across a page. Weaving together real and speculative histories of plants, dyes, and papyrus, she creates a loose tapestry of septets that accumulate into ruminations on the network of histories binding transatlantic seafaring, trade, colonialism, agriculture, and slavery. Mood Indigo reminds us that beauty and cruelty, human ingenuity and human barbarity, are inextricably linked. We love the aboveground seen; Mood Indigo asks us to consider those invisible roots beneath the field.
“The blue particles accrete,” Mood Indigo says at one point, a fact and figure bearing on matter and method, micro to macro, its own and otherwise. This quietly lyrical, hypnotic new work begins with ink and paper, quickly rays out into heterogeneous play with a kind of sideways messaging, hauntingly broods on the life of indigo in animal, plant and human affairs. It symphonically lays ply upon ply, fold upon fold, writing upon reading, a patient, seemingly sober, murmurous tack to which an antithetic perspicacity accrues. It can’t, however, help itself. Broods remains exactly the word, beautifully so, seeming sobriety both with and against it, as a rueful undergirding, the work’s own bluing, repeatedly makes its presence known and felt, felt and forlorn.

Off the Park Press, Inc.

Indigo Angel by Jeanne Heuving

Renee Gladman on Indigo Angel

Tyrone Williams on Mood Indigo

Nathaniel Mackey on Mood Indigo