For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds: Essays

A blend of literary criticism and memoir, Jennifer Moxley's For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds recounts a life spent in the company of birds and poems, intimately attuned to the mysteries of singing. These essays trace the poet's calling to sources in birdsong and sacrifice, asking, "Must a woman be sentenced to endless night for a poet to be born?" From the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the death of the poet's mother, Moxley explores the losses that underlie poetry, and in turn, poetry's use as a measure for living.For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds

About the Author :

Jennifer Moxley was born and raised in San Diego, California; she studied literature and writing at UC San Diego, University of Rhode Island, and Brown University (MFA 1994). Her poems have been included in two Norton anthologies, Postmodern American Poetry and American Hybrid. Her book The Sense Record was picked as one of the five best poetry books of the year in 2002 by both Stride magazine (UK) and Small Press Traffic (US). In 2015 her book The Open Secret was awarded the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Since 1999 she has lived in Orono, Maine, where she teaches at University of Maine.

"For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds opens a magical place of clean-lined prose, scholarly knowledge, and inspiration. The writing is deep and lucid, it cuts to the bone and yet respects the mystery of things. It works by a literary transfiguration. The poet shines with bright rays of thought and skill as she stands on a mount of experience created by the songs of poets and birds--from Sappho and Ovid to Robert Duncan and Anne Carson, from nightingales to lyrebirds--until they appear next to her and converse with her as she writes."--Robert Adamson

"Poet Moxley (Druthers) mixes memoir and criticism in a meditative series of essays that chart the 'bird soul' that lives in her, as well as avian imagery in poems by Thomas Hardy, Charles Baudelaire, and John Keats. . . . Moxley's prose is always on point, and each chapter contains provocative ideas about poetry and life more broadly: 'all the time I had longed for solitude, what I really wanted was a little privacy.' This is a lyrical treat."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Jennifer Moxley's For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds is as chimeric a collection as its main subject. The book, a hybrid creature that wheels in the currents of memoir as easily as it picks and pries at the crannies of literary criticism, is an apt embodiment of its overarching theme."--Dustin Michael, Rain Taxi