Often Capital (Paperback)

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 the 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 . . ."