Penelope Moffet

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Penelope Moffet is the author of the poetry chapbooks Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Born in Ohio, she has lived in Southern California most of her life. As a freelance journalist she interviewed many poets for the Los Angeles Times and other publications. She also worked as a publicist for non-profit organizations and as an editor, then held a legal secretary job for a quarter-century. By living very simply, she can now give as much time as she wants to writing, reading, hiking, swimming, drawing, painting, civic action and friends. She lives in a light-filled condo with a sweetly dictatorial elder cat named Emily.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The poems in Think of It As Music address street sounds that intrude on a solitary life, memories of past loves, speculations about non-human creatures, and stories about friends and the natural world. Settings range from Southern California to Northern California, Washington state and Alaska. Mostly written in free verse, these lyrical, narrative poems combine details of an examined life with a passionate looking outward—toward spiders and birds, foxes and seals, and what happens between humans. Listen, say the poems. Take time to think, dream, be.

Praise for Penelope Moffet’s previous collections:

Cauldron of Hisses (2022):

Penelope Moffet’s Cauldron of Hisses from Arroyo Seco Press seems to me the perfect poetry chapbook to have come out of the pandemic and its lockdown. It is a unified collection of poems, linked by their opening and closing lines, about different kinds of cats. It is more than this though. Underlying every poem, it is about our need for connection and how we regained it through our connection with nonhuman friends, and perhaps more importantly how we used our dreamworld to get through that time…This is a dreamy collection, and it is beautiful. It is about what the human mind can do to preserve us when allowed to bound through the jungles and savannah instead of simply dwelling on loneliness and pain.

—John Brantingham, author of Gone Back to Wild

It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (2018):

Penelope Moffet’s poetry in this fine collection is like the wind in her poem “Blow,” sweeping through the landscapes of the high desert, exploring the shapes of flora, fauna and the author’s own inner landscapes. “…here it knows / where water bubbles / above ground” Moffet writes of the wind, but she could be describing herself too, for it “has had its nose in Riverside / and Long Beach. Now / it wants to come clean.” She, too, “sniffs out wild” things that exist in remote places, far from one’s home and the comfort of the familiar.

—Grant Hier, author of Untended Garden

Keeping Still (1995):

This is a beautiful collection: rich, dreamy, deeply felt. Moffet places her poems squarely in the mountains outside Temecula, California – “Agave,” “In Chaparral,” “Clair de Lune” – but the themes of exile and longing are universal. “we’re related species / moving toward each other / hungry / like the other hunters/on the streets and mountains / far from home,” she writes in “Related Species,” and she’s talking equally about great horned owls, bats, sparrows, the rufous towhee, and the hunger between a woman and a man.

—Heather King, author of Parched