Particular Scandals

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Broad in scope--theological, ecological, and personal--and acutely particular in details--witnessed and lived--the affecting poems in Particular Scandals explore how one endures suffering, avoiding the cliches of both bitterness and transcendence. Thus, while Moore's poetry depicts the debilitating ruin illness wreaks, it also embraces the beauty and mystery in creation, in faith, even in tribulation itself. At the book's core is pure paradox and insightful integration, wedding Christmas--Christ's incarnation and eventual, willing sacrifice--to pain and grief. Thus, on the heels of Moore's multiple surgeries and amid her husband's serious heart problem--both while in their forties--come "flashes of hallelujah" and songs knit with Amens "un- / broken, like a world without end." Empathetic and observant, Moore's evocative poems also turn their attention to friends' and other family members' appalling losses: a stillborn infant, suicidal adolescents, molested, and trafficked children. All in all, the book portrays how Moore survives like the Sycamore tree in one of her poems, "scabbed and scarred from moments like this, " offering her "empty self / like a cup to the Lord of the storm." "The scandal of this collection is it sizzles with such life, such particularity, such fierce pain and love, that you may not be able to put it down. Chatting about the weather, reflecting on ill health, estimating our chances of happiness, recounting adventures of a Labrador retriever and the astonishment of the incarnation, Julie Moore sounds as close as a friend. And yes, she is as trustworthy." --Jeanne Murray Walker, author of New Tracks, Night Falling "These are poems that span our daily lives and ask the hard metaphysical and theological questions living brings. . . . They are alert (without sentimentality or false transcendence) to the grace and beauty, both ordinary and commonplace, that open our hearts and mouths in hallelujah. I so admire these poems that quietly refrain from false claims and extravagances, but patiently bring us--in their detailed evocations--closer to [our] paradoxical and mysterious lives." --Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin "What poetry can be made of [those] sufferings none of us want to live the first time around? Fine poetry, it turns out, that offers neither a romantic whitewash nor despairing doubt, but a series of beautiful particulars that offer clarity, beauty, and 'amens' in the midst of a world unlikely to change. Readers will be freshly charged to see joy in the scandal of living." --Leslie Leyland Fields, editor of The Spirit of Food "The poems of Julie Moore's exhilarating collection, Particular Scandals, are poised 'on the primal edge / of wonder.' Musical and observant, attentive to the 'mystery that envelops us, ' she glimpses the eternal in ordinary things, such as the birds she lovingly identifies, from vulture to white-breasted nuthatch. Even in a 'universe of pain, ' she discovers how to praise, as any real poet must." --John Drury, author of Creating Poetry Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom (2010) and the chapbook Election Day (2006). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and Best of the Net and has appeared both in anthologies and in publications like The Christian Century, The Missouri Review Online, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. She lives in Cedarville, Ohio, where she's the Writing Center Director at Cedarville University.