Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, appearing widely in journals including North American Review, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA. She is an Associate Editor at Glass Lyre Press and lives in the Bay Area. Shade of Blue Trees (Two Sylvias Press, Finalist for the Wilder Prize) is her first poetry collection.

Other poems by Kelly Cressio-Moeller in Verse Daily:
October 6, 2021:   "Departure" "Two months ago, I scribbled poem notes on hospital paper towels..."

Books by Kelly Cressio-Moeller:

Other poems on the web by Kelly Cressio-Moeller:
"On Why I No Longer Sit at the Window Seat on a Train"
"there was a man"
Four poems
Three poems
"Panels from a Courtly Spring"
"Panels from a Blue Summer"
"Portent with Moonset & Blackbirds"
"Away"
Five poems
"Waiting for Charon in the ER"

Kelly Cressio-Moeller's Website.

Kelly Cressio-Moeller on Twitter.

About Shade of Blue Trees:

"The poems of Kelly Cressio-Moeller's Shade of Blue Trees offer up an intimate surrealism, earth-born, deeply shaded, and tinted the deep blue of solitude, memory, and myth, turning 'yearning's blue fire/into a dreamscape fugue.' Nowhere is Cressio-Moeller's virtuosity more apparent than in the sequence of 'panels.' These pieces function as lyric poems, language-paintings, fairy tales, and compressed novels, somehow removed from time, with a lushness that reminds me of Flaubert—without the meanness. For instance: 'A wall-eyed jay cracks a cherry's/skull against the cheekbone of dusk,' and 'Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry—she orders/nests for her hair to keep skylarking near, wears the/clouds on her finger to be swallowed in vapor.' There are poems that walk the territory of the actual, from mother-loss, which winters the tips of the speaker's hair, to embodiment: 'without my cervix I am no less queen/open me, see there's nothing left to give.' Indeed this collection is evidence of a queendom that has been cultivated via solitude, loss, and time. 'For years,' she writes, 'her poemwork involved dipping arrows/into tinctures of monkshood. Beneath her shawl of/suffering, she yearned only for two gifts: to be seen, to be understood.' With the unveiling of Shade of Blue Trees, those gifts have been delivered. "
—Diane Seuss

"In Shade of Blue Trees, her astonishing debut collection, Kelly Cressio-Moeller weaves an intricate tapestry of imagery from the ferocity of grief, and the litany of disappearances we all inevitably bear, knowing every single moment something or someone is leaving. So much to praise in these resonant poems formed from the fissured bedrock of longing and sorrow: I wanted to drink a cup of winter . . . soft blades of mourning, with wry flashes of humor, this world is running out of virgins. There is nothing extraneous here, there is passion and wisdom, You taught me how not to live: all those years you were not dead but might as well have been. Each poem a hidden grotto to be re-visited, a quiet haunting in which we may take refuge."
—Amber Coverdale Sumrall

"In Kelly Cressio-Moeller's debut collection, she escorts us deep into a melancholy forest, a place both familiar and mystical. Californians will recognize much of the terrain: cypress, pampas grass, black bears, rugged coastlines, and fog. Similarly, these moody poems capture our uneasy contemporary era, while reaching their roots deep into myth. Cressio-Moeller makes our burdens of loss and worry subjects of tenderly examined power ('shoulders that ride so high on worry / they mistake themselves for wings'). Buoyed by the enduring magic of the natural world, these poems pay somber respect to the extraordinary depth of our quotidian heartaches, and to the exquisite beauty and fragility of ordinary days."
—Laura Cogan