Imagination Verses is a moving and accomplished book of real lyric poetry. Hailed as a modern masterpice it is made available here in a new expanded UK edition. Rarely does a poet bring such talent and experience together in a single volume, it is a book of wonderous possiblities, warm, engaging and truly magical.

Imagination Verses

Literature & Fiction

Moxley, Jennifer

Poetry

Tender Buttons Books

Poetry. THE LINE extends in a series of interlocking prose poems, creating a strobe-like effect of intensely imagined moments shifting between sleeping and waking. Sharp, satirical, lush, or clear, the narrative voice twists through, seeking a line through time to braid its selves together. Moxley's intrepid language tosses us into the swim of new experience; into a bracing intimacy with the writing consciousness."Something about these poems is in flight 'from each new instance of daylight,' something in them is 'asleep before belief,' not wanting the onerous responsibility of adhering to or directly articulating beliefs. And yet there is a compelling playfulness and curiosity in the poems as they move from an anatomy of desire in the present tense to an exploration of the darkness of past and future, in their refusal to 'snuff out the metaphysical questions.' There is, finally, the courage here to 'enter the grave alone'...'In other words, [to] write.'"—Julianne Buchsbaum"THE LINE extends in a series of interlocking prose poems, creating a strobe-like effect of intensely imagined moments shifting between sleeping and waking. Sharp, satirical, lush, or clear, the narrative voice twists through, seeking a line through time to braid its selves together. Moxley's intrepid language tosses us into the swim—into a bracing intimacy with the writing consciousness. These prose poems tell the story of sleeping and waking, of this very bout of writing, of the search for the line of time and the poet's immortality. THE LINE feels like a classic already, with its just words and its images suggested by sound and experience. It is a poetics but also a real, readable tale."—Alice Notley"We're in the state between sleep and waking, where consciousness resists the tasks of reason and routine but instead views, from the perspective of darkness, the whole span from newborn promise to the old mammals' erosion of muscle. Moxley's usual keen intelligence here comes with an oneiric fluidity as it hunts through the perplexities of life for THE LINE from past to future, the line for words to form and, implicitly, the ideal line of verse these prose poems play against with their amazing leaps, sly humor, and complex inference. You'll wish the morning sun would not win out, the book not come to its end."—Rosmarie Waldrop

The Line

The Post-Apollo Press

Poetry. First published as two separate chapbooks in 1995 and 1996, Often Capital explores the tensions between political commitment and personal desire. Moxley draws in part on the love letters of the Polish radical Rosa Luxemburg in searching out a habitable space for resistance. Moxley employs techniques of collage and juxtaposition as well as narration to sound her subject. Yet the lean, sonorous lines that result leap out of any categorical dichotomies.

Often Capital (Flood Editions)

Flood Editions

Poetry. Chosen by the Poetry Foundation as one of the best poetry books of 2009. Jennifer Moxley's CLAMPDOWN captures a time of political despair and self-doubt. Our "so-called common ground" erodes where liberal thought, implicated in the systems it critiques, finds no traction and becomes the site of new divisions. Against the reality of distant wars, everyday pleasures--even love itself--become frayed by anxiety and shame. Likewise, the past and the future prove unstable, both close to oblivion in a "maddeningly quiescent landscape" of winter. Throughout Clampdown, Moxley responds to the evanescence of both life and art with all her poetic resources, at times declamatory and incisive, at others "freely espousing" and conversational.

Clampdown (Flood Editions)

Literary Nonfiction. Conversational, humane, and forthright, Jennifer Moxley brings her remarkable strengths as a poet to bear on the essay tradition. At once literary and personal, THERE ARE THINGS WE LIVE AMONG follows the thread connecting texts and objects in her life, from her girlhood saddle to her mother's sewing machine, from her favorite books to an old set of frying pans. As she suggests, these things serve variously as accomplishments, talismans, fetishes, and keepers of lost life. Our attachments prove as diverse as our possessions, and yet, in the words of George Oppen that open these essays, "to see them / Is to know ourselves."

There Are Things We Live Among: Essays on the Object World (Flood Editions)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Poetry. THE OPEN SECRET is a recipe for paradox and mystery. At once formal, candid, and familiar, Jennifer Moxley invokes a common if inchoate sense of shared experience, the very passing of time, with its unforeseen effects on both love and creative life. In doing so, she asks us to consider the cost of long-held devotions and commitments, as well as our relationship to the larger whole.

The Open Secret (Flood Editions)

Poetry. With Robert Herrick and Lightnin' Hopkins as her guides, Jennifer Moxley records in these bold new poems midlife's little losses, the subtle joys of a sweet marriage, and the give-and-take of the poet's vocation. Direct in speech, full of wit and erotic exuberance, and never refusing the temptations of a double entendre, Druthers reassesses the purpose and pleasures of poetry. While navigating her way out of "deep blues and dark woods," Moxley has written some of her most masterful work yet.

Druthers (Flood Editions)

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. A blend of literary criticism and memoir, Jennifer Moxley's FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, DO NOT DESTROY THE BIRDS recounts a life spent in the company of birds and poems, intimately attuned to the mysteries of singing. These essays trace the poet's calling to sources in birdsong and sacrifice, asking, "Must a woman be sentenced to endless night for a poet to be born?" From the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the death of the poet's mother, Moxley explores the losses that underlie poetry, and in turn, poetry's use as a measure for living. "FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, DO NOT DESTROY THE BIRDS opens a magical place of clean-lined prose, scholarly knowledge, and inspiration. The writing is deep and lucid, it cuts to the bone and yet respects the mystery of things. It works by a literary transfiguration. The poet shines with bright rays of thought and skill as she stands on a mount of experience created by the songs of poets and birds--from Sappho and Ovid to Robert Duncan and Anne Carson, from nightingales to lyrebirds--until they appear next to her and converse with her as she writes."--Robert Adamson

For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds: Essays (Flood Editions)

Salt Publishing

Poetry. Jennifer Moxley's first book of poems, IMAGINATION VERSES, won praise from an astonishing array of contemporary poets, from John Ashbery to Bob Perelman, and signaled her emergence as one of the most intense, original and attentive writers of her generation. Moxley's second full-length collection, THE SENSE RECORD AND OTHER POEMS, takes that earlier style even deeper into the thickets of thought. Uncovering radical similarities between a modular, Oppen-like concentration and 19th century late-Rococo abstraction, THE SENSE RECORD is everywhere obsessed with the problem of dividing and reconciling aesthetic form(s). Some will find ravishing confessions in this book, but others will find a philosophy of art.

The Sense Record and Other Poems

Edge Books

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Books by Moxley, Jennifer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moxley, Jennifer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Imagination Verses

The Line

Often Capital (Flood Editions)

Clampdown (Flood Editions)

There Are Things We Live Among: Essays on the Object World (Flood Editions)

The Open Secret (Flood Editions)

Druthers (Flood Editions)

For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds: Essays (Flood Editions)

Imagination Verses

The Sense Record and Other Poems