The inescapable injustice of imagination: on the recent work of Jennifer Moxley.

Chicago Review, March, 1997 by Stroffolino, Chris

Imagination Verses is the first full-length book by a poet who first achieved at least some degree of national notoriety by her inclusion in the double "New Coast" issue of O-Blek magazine in 1993. Yet this long-awaited book of poetry that unironically "references" not only such "avant-garde" poets as Oppen and Palmer but also such "traditional" ones as Keats, Crane, and Wordsworth, makes Jennifer Moxley a difficult writer to place. In fact, part of the value of Imagination Verses is the way it rebukes the critic's desire to "place" both poet and poem in a culture that subordinates poetry to theoretical agendas.

This is not to say that Moxley does not herself use prose to "define" (and thereby limit) her poetic investigations. In the book's preface she...