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 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.

Visible Voice Books welcomes Monica Comas, a novelist whose stories often focus on relationships—the thorniness, humor, and necessity of them. Her debut novel, Recipe for Joy, is a cherished cookbook and poignant letters prompt a woman to reconnect with her estranged sister and embark on a revealing journey that forces her to reconcile sweet childhood memories with her soured adulthood, changing the course of her life—and her family’s—forever.

Monica Comas was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from The Ohio State University and a master’s in journalism from New York University. She’s worked as a newspaper reporter, a journalist covering stocks and the economy, and a financial editor. But fiction has always been her true love. Recipe for Joy is her debut novel. Her next novel, Upton Retreat, will come out in April 2027. Monica lives in New York with her husband, John, and their tiny shih tzu, Poirot.

https://monicacomas.com