“The better version of myself is lounging rooftop poolside at King & Grove Lifestyle Hotel drinking Perrier-Jouët with the tooth fairy. Kissing distance to the sky, I am kind, I am beautiful, I am whole. My right cheek is not the texture of crunchy peanut butter, nor is it singed dark like chocolate coating. I do not snap the rubber band on my wrist until pain-darts pierce my skin, shrapnel tearing. I am half-dark, half-light: two faced when turned-cheek. A yes-no face. If a bullet is a mouthful of pennies, how much is shrapnel?” –Alex Poppe (from Part One, Moxie)
PRAISE FOR Moxie
“Moxie gives the reader a bold and unapologetic narrator with a voice that cuts like the twang of an electric guitar. In the music of Moxie, Jax, and the reader, may find entertainment, but also a sliver of salvation.” —American Book Review
“Poppe’s writing is brisk, raw, and unflinching, and she does not attempt to romanticize her heroine, a profane drunk drowning in self-pity and self-recrimination for her part in the accident that cost her everything.” —Booklist Online
“Sentence fragments litter Moxie as a kind of linguistic shrapnel, accompanied by sharp, descriptive moments that leave the reader off-kilter as Jax goes about her day…Poppe has a deft hand with crude language and body horror and twists these moments into graceful linguistic play…”-–The Massachusetts Review
“Poppe pairs elements of her personal experience with the experiences of others, alongside vital occurrences in society, and gives way to a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and grimace throughout its pages.” –The Matador Review
“Moxie is an indie press book that deserves as much attention as it can get. It’s smart, fierce, funny, and eventually, ever so slightly uplifting.” — Bill Wolfe, Read Her Like an Open Book
“Wow. I drank down the raw, profane, world-be-damned voice of Jacinda, aka Jax, (the sexy protagonist of Poppe’s high-octane first novel) in one long gulp. Poppe artfully delivers the raging heartbreak of a young woman whose beauty is torn away after only recently propelling her from a lousy childhood into modeling superstardom. Moxie is crowded with vivid New Nork City characters, sublime writing–and a lost puppy that may steal your heart.” —Lesley Dormen, author of The Best Place to Be: A Novel in Stories.
“I tore through Moxie. Alex Poppe has created a character whose jagged contradictions make you stare.” — Zoe Zolbrod, author of The Telling and Currency
“Alex Poppe, an American writer living in Iraq, teaching English and mentoring Iraqis, giving them hope, has written a new novel, a completely different story of far-away, of hip downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, a book of street argo, bare, cool, graphic, vulgar, touching, and sweet. Her writing flows and is as edgy as the hard streets that she walks down. She makes you want to turn the page, and sometimes turn away, and through it all there is Moxie.” —Jere Van Dyk, author of Captive and The Trade: My Journey into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping
“Alex Poppe has created a stark, gritty portrait of human emotion…A brilliantly engaging, eyebrow raising read…a must read.” –The Bookwormery
“I can’t think of another book I’ve read like Moxie; Alex’s written voice is so completely unique it would be futile of me to try and drawn comparisons with any other story. I thoroughly enjoyed Moxie and I am already contemplating rereading it thanks to the thought-provoking impact it’s had on me.” —Fraser’s Fun House
“Once I had started this book, I was taken away from my world and finished it in one sitting!”–What’s in my Wonderland
“This is one of the few page turning, heart wrenching books I could find myself re-reading again and again just to experience such an emotionally and mentally challenging adventure.” –Little Tinkablee
Published by Tortoise Books