Jennifer Moxley
Poet and essayist Jennifer Moxley was born and raised in San Diego. She studied at University of California, San Diego; the University of Rhode Island, where she completed her BA; and Brown University, where she earned an MFA.
Moxley’s poems combine lyric and innovative looks at daily life while interrogating societal comfort. Reviewing Clampdown for the Nation, poet Ange Mlinko noted, “Moxley's ethical anxieties emanate from a central unease, unease at home, and ripple out to touch nation, earth and cosmos. But … Moxley does not sublimate her psychology and social perspective.” “Truth in my work is just that: a question,” asserted Moxley in an interview with Noah Eli Gordon for the Denver Quarterly. “I am a poet because language, especially as it lives in poetry, approximates my idea of truth in a more satisfying and meaningful way than any other human production or activity.”
Moxley is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Imagination Verses (1996), Often Capital (2005), The Line (2007), and Clampdown (2009), as well as the memoir The Middle Room (2007). A noted translator, Moxley has translated Jacqueline Risset’s collections of poetry, The Translation Begins (1996), and essays, Sleep’s Powers (2008), as well as Anne Portugal’s Absolute bob (2010).
Moxley has won the Denver Quarterly’s Linda Hull Award, and her work has been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2002), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004), and American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009).
Imagination Verses is available in the
