Molly Tenenbaum lives in Seattle, Washington, where she teaches creative writing at North Seattle Community College and plays traditional string band music. She is the author of By a Thread (Van West & Co., 2000), and of the chapbooks Blue Willow (Floating Bridge Press, 1998), Old Voile (New Michigan Press, 2004), and Story (Cash Machine, 2005). Her CD of old-time banjo is Instead of a Pony, and she plays with the string bands Dram County and The Queen City Bulldogs.

Other poems by Molly Tenenbaum in Verse Daily:

July 3, 2007:   "For My Biographers, Hints of My Lover" " Earth, air, the whole astronomy, more..."
December 4, 2004:  "To My New Life" "I've been in you / a while now so..."

Books by Molly Tenenbaum: Now, Story, By a Thread

Other poems on the web by Molly Tenenbaum:
Two poems
"Hungry, With Fiddle and Bow"
"Bungling the Trees"
Two poems
"My Eyebrows"
Two poems
"My My-ness"

Molly Tenenbaum's Home Page.

About Now:

"Molly Tenenbaum's Now is a valentine from a poet in love with the world, and she has found the words to prove it. Read these poems aloud; let them swirl in 'your earhole's riviera.' Follow her into her garden, kitchen, library, heart. She will not lead you astray or maybe she will, but you will eat well, laugh, dance, and cry. Nothing is ordinary—her peace march turns into a 'peach march' and so much more. These poems are a sensual delight."
—Barbara Hamby

"Molly Tenenbaum's new poems in Now are odes to living in the present, but they're far from simple Carpe diem's. Here the 'new life' the speaker is intent on making is layered with memories of past pleasures and loss, and also with hopes and fears for the future. The poems celebrate the sensory immediacy of "mustard seeds jumping in ginger-oil" and 'beautiful cucumber's palest green,' but even the most vivid details resonate in an echo chamber of what was: 'We'd unwrap lemon-flecked air,' and what might have been: 'a baby's raspberry lullaby lips.' This making it new, keeping ourselves present for our own lives wherever they may lead, is no easy task, and the narrator procrastinates, makes lists, urges herself on: 'Please weather open the stiff/ barn door of my chest.' But she goes about it not just with great bravery, but with humor, playfulness, even joy: 'I loved that word. Maroon, maroon.' And, 'I love the fall from struck string like fire on a rope....' The poems crackle with intelligence and wordplay, and their music transforms pain, sadness, the sensory world, everything they encounter, into a made life, into a work of art."
—Sharon Bryan