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Mako Sica is the Lakota name for the Dakota Badlands.

And for the eight months of 2004 that Cedarville poet Julie L. Moore suffered through misdiagnoses, the haze of unnecessary drug treatment and what one of her poems calls "the kind of pain that stabs and shoots, sociopathic in its intention," she chronicled the travels through her own badlands.

A correct diagnosis and two minor surgeries eventually freed her from the rugged wilderness of pain. But emerging from what her poem Mako Sica calls "the 101-degree heat of disbelief," she almost threw the poems away, sure they had suffered from the pain and drugs that seemed to have so addled her mind.

Fortunately, Moore took another look, something readers soon will be able to do when "Election Day," a chapbook of her poems, is released by Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, Ky.

Pain is not all that's chronicled in the 24 works of free verse written over a six-year period, most of them previously published in journals and magazines.

As the opening poem of the collection points out, Moore, 41, director of the Cedarville University Writing Center, is a poet who wakes up each day to hear "that gnawing spirit/like the mourning dove atop your roof/cooing ultimate questions."

That means she notices things — things like the "gauzy hammocks" of spider webbing that hang between blades of grass on dewy mornings, "sagging as though a tiny body/invisible and round/lies napping."

And once her eye notices trees that have been lobotomized to allow power lines to pass through or a February fog that has "embossed every naked brittle limb," her mind seeks to sound out deeper meanings.

So as the title "Of things unseen" indicates, her spiders point to something else.

There is "evidence everywhere that the spiders do exist/among us, (even) though we've seen none thus far, though the only discernible sound/is traffic on a state road/howling in the distance ..."

Moore's ability to end that poem trailing off with ellipsis (...) is a strength.

A Christian by faith, she seems willing to allow the world of her poems to remain pregnant with meaning without having to connect all meaning in each moment with a particularly famous baby whose birth is celebrated on Dec. 25.

Christian allusions instead seem to sprout organically, often with surprising freshness.

In the book's title poem, the poet, during "my fifth month of impervious pain," she imagines leaving the world like the Prophet Elijah: "sailing through/those saturated clouds,/ shedding my clothes,/my damaged flesh, my/ bones, candidate for heaven/who just leaves this world,/this dominion of skin."

More jarring is "Elisha's Bones," a poem in which she brings to life the Biblical story of a dead man tossed into Elisha's tomb who is revived by spirit still inhabiting the prophet's body.

"And once again,

you heard your heartbeat

suffocating silence, you found breath,

coughing dust from your chest ....

And you knew your place,

as though you were Adam

again emerging from clay ..."

Moore's honesty is also striking.

In "Filling in the Blank," a touching poem about a mother trying to protect a sensitive son from her pain, he asks whether she has had a good day, and she says yes.

"He smiles and tells me he'd prayed/for me in class. He is glad/God answered the way he wanted.

"We go home. He pens a "G" in the day's box./

"And I wonder how to inspire his faith/Without lies like the one I just told."

In "Teresa," a friend who overdosed and committed suicide walks toward her destiny over "a quarter-mile of gravel like the rubble of your life." And in "Agony of Healing," addressed to the same friend, Moore recounts the moment when she turns away from that path and re-enters the pain.

"My eyes, my head, my back turned, entered this raw minute — the nape of my neck still stinging from the lure of surrender — entered into the palpable arms of God. You were right about one thing: It's the healing that kills."

Moore ponders God's place in her time in the wilderness.

In "Proximity," she sees the peaks of the Appalachians "overlapping each other like heads and shoulders in a family" and wonders whether God watches on from the most distant peak or "so close my hand could touch its flesh sun-pierced side."

In "Answer" she finds a God who speaks to her not directly but through poetic sensibilities.

On a December day when she's felt "so few traces of grace in six months of fierce pain where deep called to deep and there was no reply," she finds God's answer as her teenage daughter returns from walking their dog, Maggie. Ashley appears "on the crest of the hill like some grand apparition, Maggie crisscrossing before her tracking the tang of fox like an answer."

There is more to Moore's poetry — poems as simple as a stroll in the country around Cedarville, some as shocking as a poem of the suicide of a teen that begins with crows landing "like bullet shells on our white lawn Thanksgiving morning."

But ever present is a sense of the essential mystery about knowing and of a world constantly being discovered.

Because of this, her poems will connect with people who sense that spirit, regardless of whether they connect it to a creed.

"Election Day," by Julie L. Moore, can be ordered for $14 until Nov. 8 from www.finishinglinepress.com. After that, there will be a $2 fee for shipping and handling.