Don't Misplace the Moon

Annie Stenzel's poetry collection, Don't misplace the moon, is a lyrical love song to living, sensuous and delightful, a reminder to savor what dwindles, to live in "the barefaced moment / called Now." With a keen eye and a gift for conjuring sensory imagery that borders on the mystical, Stenzel shows us a world "gauzed with the stain of morning light," an apple's riotous "shout of flavor," how "the bright of this red / stands up to a dim that would engulf [her]." This book builds a trellis of beauty, a sturdy support a person can cling to and clamber up. Though "being alive is a wound that won't heal," the poems in Don't misplace the moon nudge us toward joy and wonder, and linger, long after we finish reading, like "a whisper / as if bliss were stirring."

-Francesca Bell, author of What Small Sound and Bright Stain, both published by Red Hen Press

In Annie Stenzel's attentive poems, the birds sing not "how can I, how can I... but something similar." Through such meticulous observation of songbirds, scarlet gerbera, singing toadfish, and the moon, the poet revels as she reveals, offering a seasoned perspective, an equanimity, sharing her wisdom about how can I be alone with a "trickster mind / an everyday cornucopia." In good-natured despair, the poet sings along with the sensual world, her wordplay and formal poems summoning wonder to temper the wanting and disappointments in life. This is a capacious collection, and generous, its hands pressed together in a gesture both of supplication and of praise.

-Jessica Goodfellow, author of Whiteout (University of Alaska Press), Mendeleev's Mandala (Mayapple Press) and The Insomniac's Weather Report (Isobar Press)

"Ah, listen! how often language rings me / like a sympathetic bell," urges Annie Stenzel in her exuberant collection Don't misplace the moon. What can the reader do but follow the poet's entrancing voice and keen eye through landscapes that both are and are not of this world? Stenzel's lavish poems peel veil after veil from reality, for "everything [she sees] hides another thing." There's a longing here for being wholeheartedly present, for whittling a sturdier self through language, because "[b]eing alive is a wound that won't heal." And there's a vibrant excitement here to be no more than one already is, a temporary vessel that can contain, for a moment, the universe; a human being who yearns "to know hunger, and imagine."

-Romana Iorga, author of Temporary Skin