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."
Review :
"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
