Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Devil's Backbone

Devil's Backbone

Moore, Julie L.

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $19.99

ISBN10: 1961741296
ISBN13: 9781961741294
Publisher: Wildhouse Publications
Published: Jun 23 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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