Perseus Academic: Post Moxie by Julia Story

A voice distinctly human, frighteningly so, is what we encounter in Julia Story's Post Moxie, winner of the 2009 Kathryn A. Morten Prize in Poetry. Her poems read like missives from the front line of existence, and they've arrived to tell us it's wicked out there. Yet, these poems, striking and strange in both content and form, remind us of the many ways a thing can be beautiful. What's most beautiful about them is their sound, her attention to the subtle textures of our language. Story's ear is first-rate. The lines, most of them haunting, beg to be read aloud.

— Ryan Vine, Star Tribune

Poems that think this carefully and provocatively about themselves are scarce. But that's no reason to read a person's poems. The misery and the total enchantment of being alive, of being a complex person, mysterious even to oneself, and of feeling like a cliché, of drawing from art and despising art, of thinking simultaneously 'fuck this' and 'bring me more' — that's what got put into this book, and that's what we get out of it.

— Dan Chiasson