My Books
Particular Scandals: A Book of Poems will appear in The Poiema Poetry Series, edited by D.S. Martin and published by Cascade Books, in 2013. More details forthcoming.
Slipping Out of Bloom
A Book of Poems
Released in May from WordTech Editions, Slipping Out of Bloom can be purchased through the publisher's website or from the author directly (see the contact page on this Web site).
Julie L. Moore’s observant, vivid, calmly moving poems are centered in her own home, in her own everyday life, but they radiate outward, taking in what’s distant, invisible, and hard to comprehend as well as what’s intimate and “in close proximity.” The ornamental pear tree that “slips / out of bloom” is emblematic of the insight that everything is in a process of becoming. Her courageous poems face death and inexplicable illness, finding themselves able to “buoy in the wake / of the passing day.” Through particular acts of noticing, paying attention to friends, family, and a life-list of creatures, she comes to a hard-earned faith, discovering “magnified / through sun and glass / reason for our being."
John Drury
The world’s stubborn strangeness, its painful loveliness, and the search for traces of God amidst its people and creatures—Julie L. Moore braids all of these obsessions beautifully together into these luminous, resonant, unflinching poems, and somehow finds hope for this world among it all.
Jeff Gundy
The poems of Julie L. Moore’s Slipping Out of Bloom reveal an edge: fine, sharp, reflective, dangerous. She acknowledges lines that unite us and divide us yet lingers over the enchantment born from a fruitful blurring of those borders. Moore has lived to tell us about the places in our world where the delicate and the durable meet and merge. The sheer and piercing audacity of her words will wake you to the sound of your own breathing.
Eric Paul Shaffer
These poems are craft from Julie L. Moore's daily life—walking Maggie the dog, sawing up a beloved, fallen tree, playing Scrabble with her family, noticing how leaves are strewn like letters across a flat, Ohio lawn. Her poetry refrains from overstatement and extravagant gesture. It delineates many subtle colors on the palette of human suffering and faithfully documents nuances of joy. What a rare pleasure to read a book so honest, so humble, and so utterly trustworthy!
Jeanne Murray Walker
Praise for Slipping Out of Bloom
Read a review from the Springfield News Sun
Election Day
Cover by Ricky Normandeau
Published by Finishing Line Press, 2006
Available for purchase at amazon.com for $14 + s & h, or by contacting me personally (I’ll be glad to autograph it for you!)
In Election Day, Julie L. Moore unearths the beauty and frailty in both the natural world and the landscape of pain. Negotiating the often blurred boundaries between visible and invisible realities, her poems traverse the expanse between awe and uncertainty, perseverance and surrender, tough questions and even tougher answers.
Praise for Election Day:
Read a review from the Springfield News Sun
Read a review from Christianity and Literature (58.4, 2009)
"Like Keats, Julie L. Moore turns illness against itself, letting the agony and urgency of a body in distress cast a lovely and penetrating light over the surface of the world she moves through."
- George Bilgere, winner of the 2006 May Swenson Poetry Award for Haywire
"Julie L. Moore wonders at the vast distance in the small spaces between us all, and she discovers that pain, our own and that of those we love, is a place where a good long look provides a perspective on what we must endure. "
- Eric Paul Shaffer, winner of the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature and author of Lahaina Noon
"Attentive to the natural world and human relations, resisting all easy consolations, Moore explores her own mysterious illness, a friend's suicide, and the complex network of her life with clarity and insight. She discovers among the terrors and confusions of this life a tender music, a beauty 'so intense, it didn't look real'--and even the possibility of a tough-minded faith."
- Jeff Gundy, author of Deerflies, winner of the 2005 Nancy Dasher Award
About Finishing Line Press:
Finishing Line Press is a critically acclaimed poetry publisher based in Georgetown, Kentucky. In addition to the Chapbook Series, of which Election Day is a part, it publishes the New Women’s Voices Series and sponsors the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition. Finishing Line Press and editor Leah Maines were featured in both the 2001 and 2002 Poet’s Markets.