Holly Bass

This poem by Holly Bass immediately stood out in the Langston Hughes Tribute Issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, volume 12, number 1, winter 2011, here. It's called "Indigo" and is a great example of how poems can be clear and direction while being full of complex, Imagist beauty, even despite the subject matter. Here's an excerpt:
[...]
hands stained
with so much indigo
blood seeps black first
pine tar deep
before I can see
it is as red
as everybody else’s

indigo stains the teeth
when you sink them,
ivory, into the
poisoned plum of me

the shroud of my sadness is such
that even black spirituals
sung in backwater churches
cannot rescue me
from my desolation

I’m so blue
the black sea
borrows its hue from me

so blue
sapphires merely emulate
my absence

there are no words for this
in my poor slave’s English

I am
an open wound in an inconspicuous place
a comfortable agreement with death

I am

a slave dance
after a long day of work

I am

the broken neck of a dreamer
the opposite of an orgasm

gatemouth brown cannot utter
my essence
taj mahal cannot wail
my presence
robert johnson came close—
touched his fingers to the surface
of my shimmering waters,
then played ghost

said he’d rather deal
with the spirit world
than exist forever
in my netherworld—
I couldn’t blame him [...]