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. As she writes in an afterword to this volume, "In my researches I mistook my title, OFTEN CAPITAL—a banal dictionary designation—as a description of, to use William Godwin's phrase, 'things as they are.' Yes, often capital I thought, but thankfully not always."
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: "our imagined finish line / is the end of reason, the irresistible tantalization / of presence, lips pressed together open / to eat..."
Author City: ORONO, ME USA
Jennifer Moxley's most recent books of poetry include CLAMPDOWN (Flood Editions, 2009), THE LINE (The Post-Apollo Press, 2007), and OFTEN CAPITAL (Flood Editions, 2005). Her memoir, THE MIDDLE ROOM, was published by Subpress in 2007. She is a professor of English at the University of Maine in Orono.