Devil’s Backbone

by Julie L. Moore

Release Date: June 23, 2026

ISBN (print): 978-1-961741-29-4

Coming Soon!

Julie L. Moore’s Devil’s Backbone is a fearless, morally urgent reckoning with American history, white supremacy, and the self. Moore confronts inherited cruelties, national hypocrisy, and personal responsibility with unflinching honesty, confessing that she is “more than / complicit” as “a fragile, white / woman” who would like to “carve [herself] out of this story but can’t.” Though the poet realizes she has “no tool / to make the crooked path straight” and “can’t stop the killing,” her resonant diction, controlled musicality, and inventive forms uncover glimmers of mercy, transforming ordinary images, archival fragments, and historical voices into charged meditations. Her engagement with biblical language and ritual becomes both indictment and reclamation, language turned toward justice, faith remade through empathy, realizing as she does that the “face of any threat” is her own, and that the “ontological chord / reverberating / in the trees” connects us all. These poems question pervasive myths that boast “colonial features” with their “diabolical sweat” while daring to “invade such calculated division” so that what rises from the nation’s “white-washed tombs full of violence” are “groans of the Ghost— / yes, Holy!” Like the “primal paradox” of “cold fluorescence,” these poems are tender and confrontational, elegiac and lucid, visionary and ethically exacting. In the end, Moore shifts from indictment to relational repair, from despair to hope, imagining social engagement as an act of defiance and grace, a “slow work” that “is not about transcendence” but rather like a “penny whistle beckoning in the pitch / of expectation.

Julie L. Moore

Julie L. Moore is a Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominated author of four poetry collections, including the acclaimed collections Particular Scandals and Full Worm Moon. Moore’s poetry has won Fare Forward’s poetry competition, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate, the Editor’s Choice Award from Writecorner Press, and the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance. Her poems have been included in art exhibitions, inspired a musical composition for the Chorale at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and received an Award of Merit from The Associated Church Press.

Praise for Devil’s Backbone

“In Devil’s Backbone, Julie L. Moore takes the reader into the annals of American history where violence, belief, and identity press against one another, asking what it means to live inside a legacy that cannot be disowned. These poems move through landscapes marked by memory and erasure, tracing how personal conscience is shaped by national myth, inherited silence, and acts both named and unnamed.

Moore’s work listens closely to scripture, to archival fragments, to the ordinary world charged with meaning, and turns that listening into a form of reckoning. Grief and tenderness, doubt and devotion, coexist in poems that refuse easy absolution while remaining open to moments of grace. Devil’s Backbone is a collection attuned to the slow work of moral attention, imagining connection not as redemption, but as an act of courage rooted in presence, responsibility, and care.”

— Angela Jackson-Brown, author Untethered & House Repairs, winner of the Alabama Library Association Poetry Award 

“Rarely do white poets engage directly with the issue of Whiteness as a concept of oppression.  I think of Martha Collins, or the late Jake Adam York. Julie L. Moore joins these fine poets in poems that sing against oppressive systems, examining a wide range of cultural artifacts both physical and textual such as museums and memorials, folk tales, photographs, the Lone Ranger, newspaper clippings, ads for runaway slaves.  She uses Christian texts, testimonies, erasures, and narratives to tell stories both personal and in historical personas, all told in a variety of meters and forms. These are dialogic poems, art that offers through craft and ear to the reader a measure of music through whose singing means resistance.”

— Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys

“In Devil’s Backbone, Julie L. Moore admits, “I want to carve myself / out of this story but can’t,” as she engages in the slow, hard work of witness and the recognition of how white the skeletons are in the dark of this nation’s closet. Through thoroughly researched and enfleshed personas, Moore gives voice to a diverse body of characters without speaking over them, forcing readers to wear unfamiliar shoes and skin with empathy. The images in this collection leave one unable to turn more blind eyes to the self-serving banality of evil contained in social norms, false science, and corrupted Scripture. Importantly, Moore questions how well faith and love can cover a multitude of sins when it’s the blood of brothers and sisters that stains the hands of the supposed faithful. She masterfully reminds us that torn flesh can only be healed after the wound and blade are acknowledged.”

— Matthew E. Henry, author of The Third Renunciation and said the Frog to the scorpion

“In Devil’s Backbone, Julie L. Moore contends with America’s history of white supremacy. She looks hard, and writes what she sees. But these are poems not only about historical atrocity but also about family intimacy, about memory. Moore understands—and, crucially, writes like she understands—that seemingly personal concerns cannot be separated from the history of one’s homeland, that to understand oneself, one must understand centuries of one’s country.”

— Shane McCrae, author of New and Collected Hell: A Poem