Cathryn Essinger is the author of four previous books of poetry, most recently The Apricot and the Moon, released this spring from Dos Madres Press. A chapbook of poems about raising Monarch butterflies is forthcoming, also from Dos Madres. The title is Wings, or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight? Essinger's poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals including Poetry, The Southern Review, The New England Review, The Antioch Review, Rattle, and River Styx. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and "Best of the Net," featured on The Writer's Almanac, and reprinted in American Life in Poetry. Essinger is a long standing member of The Greenville Poets. She lives in Troy, Ohio where she raises butterflies and tries to live up to her dog's expectations.

Other poems by Cathryn Essinger in Verse Daily:
March 4, 2010:   "Outside Consultant" "He walks in, sits down, tucks his tail fin..."
January 13, 2009:   "Bees" "Some worship the sun..."
November 16, 2007:   "Why Dogs Tell Stories" " She stands at the end of the driveway..."
January 15, 2005:  "Mourning Doves" "Surely, in the long, dovetailed history..."
November 29, 2004:  "Wonder" "November, and Cinderella's coach is moldering..."
November 22, 2004:  "Close Quarters" "Having never opened a can of sardines..."
March 22, 2004:  "A Desk in the Elephant House" "Sometimes something huge sits down..."

Books by Cathryn Essinger:

Other poems on the web by Cathryn Essinger:
Eigth poems
Four poems
Three poems
Three poems
"To Levitate..."
Two poems

*Cathryn Essinger's Website.

About The Apricot and the Moon:

"Everything we thought we knew, and much we didn't, is suddenly revelatory in Cathryn Essinger's The Apricot and the Moon. Beneath her poems' clear surfaces, beneath their artful whimsicality, life and death play out, illuminated under the guiding cast of the moon, which figures here as both talisman and witchery. In its light her characters come alive: loved ones, both human and animal, friends and neighbors, the ghosts of cats, heron, deer, and fox, and even the spirits of trees. 'There is no substitute for the world itself,' she writes, and in this book she amply proves it."
—Myrna Stone

"Cathryn Essinger's poems whisper their large secrets into the still yet ever-changing world. In this rich, insightful collection, the natural cycles spin around us while she reminds us to stop spinning ourselves and look closely at the small things to find our holy spaces and places. She is a moon watcher, and like the moon, she pulls us effortlessly to places of deep wisdom and insight. Her poems are rich with the tenderness of the unspoken. This collection resonates with humble beauty and wonder."
—Jim Daniels

"Cathryn Essinger's newest collection, The Apricot and the Moon, is a delight of image and song. Early in its pages an abandoned goose egg is carried '...home for the neighbor boy/ who loves stilled things.' 'Language/alone will never suffice,' Essinger tells us. '[T]here is no substitute for the world itself...' But with her words, Essinger has created a world which is not still, but fluid with meaning and memory, where 'small things rise everyday and fly.' Not unwatched, but with wonder and meticulous attention rendered in poems that are themselves small things that rise in the reader's mind. That fly."
—Pauletta Hansel

"...it is refreshing to read the work of Cathryn Essinger who realizes that before it can do anything else, poetry must give pleasure. Smart, sweetly crafted and open-voiced her poems are propelled not only by memory, but by thought and wit. She is a poet after my own heart–and she has it."
—Billy Collins