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""In lines that reach from the lushly lyric to the deliberately prosaic, Jennifer Moxley takes stock of her life in late middle-age. She acknowledges limits and addresses losses without bitterness, with the gracious, even tone that has become her trademark. Following the path of Horace's Epistles, Moxley nods to past Romantic excesses while praising her current household pleasures in small town Maine. These pleasures are both expected and unexpected, for instance in the long poem '1900, ' Moxley goes grocery shopping with her husband during the early days of the pandemic, enjoying the mutual routines they've developed to keep safe while finding scarce products on the shelves. (This made me remember how, in those days, almost any outing could seem like an adventure.) While in the supermarket, she wonders about the life of her grandmother, a Texan painter who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic. It is this stereoscopic focus on time that gives book its depth. Though it also addresses dead poet friends, The Midnight Work is never morbid. In a time where many of us seem hypnotized by apocalyptic visions, Moxley celebrates everyday life, even in extraordinary circumstances. This is now unusual enough, I think, to be called brave.""--Rae Armantrout ""Jennifer Moxley's The Open Secret (Flood Editions, 2014) does more than confirm her place among her generation's finest poets, it signals a shift (that is a lesson in itself) away from 'experiment' as a given avant-garde value in favor of a poetry that cannot assume the experimental gesture is the most honest one . . . this book marks the mind finding itself in the midst of middle age and seeking those experiences that sustain a life fully.""--Dan Beachy-Quick, Colorado Review, reviewing a previous edition or volume ""[Druthers] is a paean to the joys of the flesh, the eros of a long-partnered couple, the ear's pull toward the music of verse, the delights of domesticity, even a seductive imaginary monster called the Penetralium.""--Kathleen Ossip, Fence, reviewing a previous edition or volume

Author Information

Jennifer Moxley was born in 1964 and grew up in San Diego, California. She is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, two books of essays, and a memoir, The Middle Room. She works as a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.

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