indigo: the color of grief

Why read poems about grief? (Especially if they're good?) I read this collection of haunting, thoughtful, sometimes playful, always loss-infused, poems about a 20-year-old daughter lost in an auto accident while my own daughter of the same age was on a road trip. 'Why do this?' I'd wonder, compelled all the while to turn page after poignant page. Artfully explored grief is also a meditation on life, love, and all we'd grieve if it were lost. Grief is worth exploring precisely because we need to be reminded to find joy in all that is precious and dear. Loss is powerful. At its most powerful, it invokes its opposite: the life within and around us to delight in now, precicely because it too is on the verge of being lost.

As someone who has lost a child, Indigo speaks to me at the heart/soul level. Thank you, Jonathan, for sharing your pain in such a beautiful way.

Each page of the book is filled with truths of grief, love, and life.Beautifully poetic, uncomfortably authentic, and profound love...along with the raw pain of grief.This is the best love letter I have experienced in literature.This book will transform you and your life as it did to me.

Jonathan Foster’s book “Indigo: the color of grief” offers a unique contribution to the world of grief writing because of his ability to express his loss experience is a way that is authentic/profoundly painful while also deeply hopeful. I feel his words as I read them, which has been cathartic to emotional processing of both personal loss and professional support as a grief counselor.

This is a poetic book you feel and it feels you somehow, a dynamic engagement that plumbs the depths of the human experience of grief. Whitehead was right about perpetual perishing, and it can really suck at times. Yet Foster wraps the book provocatively, leaving the reader raw yet with a hint of hope. Not a bow as on a gift - that would cheapen his work. Something deeper that calls us to the depths where the source resides. - Pete Shaw

Foster's young adult daughter was killed in a tragic accident. I sorrow for the author's sufferings. But I am grateful for the existence of this book, that something so wise and beautiful can come out of such tragedy. This itself gives me hope.It's hard to classify indigo. It's a memoir of grief, and it is written in very accessible, contemporary free verse. It's also a work of theology, reflecting on the kind of religious and community experiences that prove beautiful and helpful, or useless and offensive, amidst pain.grievingis the longingfor homeSo says Foster. And so the reading of this book allows for a kind of homecoming into our own lives.

I read it in one sitting. I'll read it again, slower next time. It is real and raw and poetic. The formatting is unique and perfect. It doesn't offer answers, but an invitation to be free from the answers that are unhelpful and harmful - and there find permission/hope/freedom/love in the pain. I'd recommend it to all who carry grief and all who care for those who carry grief.

What a wonderful and powerful book about a subject most of us try to shove under the cushions… Grief….jonathon_Foster has a way with words that brings comfort to the grief stricken, meaning in the midst of meaninglessness and hope for the heart sick. Thank you jonathon_Foster for a wonderful book. Well written (and creatively written!!). I a year where i lost both parents, it meant a lot…and brought me a significant amount of peace and meaning.