The Midnight Work

Jennifer Moxley's The Midnight Work is a meditation on the fragility of memory and love in the increasingly mediated post-Covid world of polarized politics and climate change. Oscillating between the intimate and the expansive, Moxley addresses old friends, living and dead, in a series of epistles among more condensed lyric poems. Lacking the exhortation to contentment found in Horace, these poems nevertheless bend toward an Epicurean temperance and resilience amid folly, disappointment, and inevitable loss.

Sample Poem:

The Sonoma sunlight,

plumper of jammy grapes

clutching dusty hillocks,

sparer of area barons'

nestled residences, is a

blood-orange ball behind

a curtain of brown ash.

Even the algae in my brother's

swimming pool looks eerily

crystal in the smoke-filtered light.