The Cupboard Artist

Molly Tenenbaum is the author of five full-length poetry collections: The Arborists (MoonPath Press, 2023), Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017), The Cupboard Artist (Floating Bridge Press, 2012) Now (Bear Star Press 2007), and By a Thread (Van West & Company, 2000). Her chapbooks are Blue Willow (Floating Bridge Press, 1998), Old Voile (New Michigan Press, 2004), and Story (Cash Machine, 2005). Her collaborative book with Ellen Ziegler, featuring photographs and poems about ventriloquism, is Exercises to Free the Tongue.

Her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry 1991, Black Warrior Review, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cranky, The Diagram, Fine Madness, In Posse, Nimrod, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Shenandoah, and Swivel.

“In Molly Tenenbaum’s The Cupboard Artist we get mauve and jet and puce and garnet, bronze gold thread, and flame. We get caterpillar yarn, chocolate suede, clotted malt, and firefall velvet dresses and blue aromas of pine. We get braids of burlap and rose brown grass and wedges and spindles and trusses and tweezers and peppercorn cheese. In short, we get every color, texture, taste and almost-fingertip-touched longing, in this keenly noticed collision of the inner and outer life, this erotic, musical, painterly, reflective and seriously joyous book. I love every page of it.”
—Christopher Howell

“These densely imagistic poems are no stream of consciousness, but instead a stream of conflicting desires. Molly Tenenbaum presents us with food and flesh and the hunger that comes from wanting them even as you hold them in your hands-in such a richly populated world of things, she gives us true longing. While the possibilities are endless—say this, say that, ‘Say he never came back. Would you still / love to be alone?’—the woman, that held-at-a-distance ‘her,’ that these poems turn their gaze on can’t decide how to embrace the incompletion of desire. And so we join her in the pleasures of hunger, like the bees, ‘confused, so much air / between them and the flowers.’” —Keetje Kuipers