Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don't misplace the moon, was released from Kelsay Books in July, 2024. Her earlier book was The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including Atlas and Alice, Galway Review, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SWWIM, The Lake, Thimble, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.

Other poems by Annie Stenzel in Verse Daily:
August 17, 2018:   "Cassandra talks in her sleep" "But if you're waiting for me..."

Other poems on the web by Annie Stenzel:
Two poems
"A question"
"Before we all took names"
"A ghazal is always within reach of pain"
"Come, cup of tea, and bid me write morning"
"Do you need a little darkness to get you going?"
"Poor all of us with such heavy burdens"
Three poems
Two poems
"Shelter. Cage."
"Meditation on mortality with a line from a poem by Antonio Machado"
Two poems
"When I say I owe my life to dead poets, I really mean it (Part II)"
"On my first night at altitude, sleep often eludes me"
"The Auspices"
"Nightmared"
"Dwindle"
"Lately, Certain Months Decline Their Customary Duty"
Three poems
"Pierced by vicarious sorrow"

Annie Stenzel's Website.

About 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.'"
—Blurbmeister1

"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

"'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