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A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices is a collection of poems in women’s voices. Over half of them are historical women, including such legends as Frida Kahlo, Hedy Lamarr, and Amelia Earhart, as well as lesser-known women with important things to say. The historical women have all been well researched and you will find short, relevant biographies of them in the back of the book.
In A Certain Ache, Bonnie Wehle amplifies a chorus of women’s voices, revealing a shared daring and desperation in the interior lives of artists, scientists, explorers, and those without fame. Wehle’s speakers transmute their griefs into art and discovery, finding that what they make can hold, but not undo, loss. Without denying suffering, Wehle proclaims these women’s drive to create and to endure. ~ Julie Swarstad Johnson, author of Pennsylvania Furnace
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Praise for A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices
(Excerpts from reviews posted on Finishing Line Press)
Be prepared. When you read Wehle’s poems in the voices of these remarkable women, voices which the author captures brilliantly, your heart too will ache.
Janet Rives, Into This Sea of Grass
Bonnie Wehle’s women use words that sting with a “certain ache,” but always leave us with an affirmation of their strength. Her phrase “I am a woman” echoes with a wistful beauty throughout the collection…
Katie Sarah Hale, Teach Me About the Moon
We come away with a new knowing and a haunting intimacy through their stories. I, for one, am changed.
Bonnie Staiger, N. Dakota Assoc. Poet Laureate, In Plains Sight
In A Certain Ache Bonnie Wehle’s understanding poems get to the heart of all these women. They are moving and a treasure to return to for inspiration again and again.
Dorothy Blake
Somehow I felt I knew these women who paved my path better after reading it. It’s not just a book of poetry, it’s history, our foremothers, and a lesson in true empathy beautifully delivered.
Julie Hutslar, Relationships: Gifts of the Spirit
This is a book of poetry that will mesmerize anyone, even those who think they don’t like poetry. Who could resist a view into the intimate lives of women we think we know? Curiosity and surprise draws us in, the stylistically accomplished language keeps us reading.
Christine Baines
Frida!
In the marketplace,
I track through tangled aisles,
in my Tehuana dress—
my gangling earrings announce me.
I greet everyone I see,
craftsmen, shopkeepers,
strangers, I wave,
a ring on each of my fingers,
my hair braided with ribbons, festooned
with flowers.
The looks I get!
I relish the market’s music of babble and laughter,
it’s perfume of calla lilies, spices, freshly baked bread.
I load my basket with calabacitas,
tomatoes, avocados, nopalitos,
corn tortillas, queso fresco—
ingredients for our lunch,
and—to paint— a small melon.
I stop at the confectioner’s stall—chocolate
mixed with cinnamon and crushed almonds—
my favorite.
Plain chocolate is not enough.
I select some pieces, broken,
like my body, my heart.
All that’s whole is my love for Diego.
What he returns is not enough.
Cluttering my shelves—
the babies I can’t have.
Dolls—cheap, pricey, papier mâché, Chinese,
two from Paris, old fashioned,
their loose heads tilting to one side.
Between two rag dolls, a human fetus
in a jar of formaldehyde—
don’t ask from where.
On the table, a tiny house stuffed with tiny furniture,
the empty crib of my barrenness beside my bed.
So many losses,
Diego doesn’t come anymore.
Basta. Enough, I say.
I fill my heart’s void with monkeys, dogs, parrots,
paint images of fetuses,
and myself, so often myself—and blood.
You may call me a surrealist, like Señor Dali,
but I always paint the truth—my truth—
though I would like to see lions come out of that bookshelf
and not books.
To me, there is little difference between love
and art, between passion and madness.
Madness is yellow, I am sure of that.
Van Gogh’s house in Arles, yellow.
Mine, blue, deep and intense.
For sadness?
No, for purity.
But black—black
is for nothing—and everything.
Black is for holes, empty wombs,
black borders, black moods.
Black inkblots, the menstrual blood
that each month reminds me of my unborn babies.
In my sketchbook,
so much is outlined in black—
caged—
by love and suffering,
so much suffering.
All those self-portraits—
all those disembodied legs and feet I draw
to sever the hurt. Canvases can’t
feel the pain.
Published in Metaforología Gaceta Literaria, November 25, 2018
Eve Writes to Her Great-Granddaughters
I want to write to you of summer peaches
plums fresh off the branch
their lusciousness in my mouth.
Instead, I gnaw
on fruit from an apple tree in a garden
someone else once wrote about
trying to persuade me it was my own fault
the pestilence, pain, fighting, smiting.
The shame.
Trying to tell me how perfect it all was
the purring panthers, curly-coated ungulates
winged things of all sizes
and every sort of blooming vine,
until an asp slithered down and seduced me with lies.
Until angels, with clumsy wings, convinced me
I could fly, then let me fall,
and failed to tell me there were still snakes in the trees,
their tongues flicking with deceit.
And there they remain, my darlings.
Don’t be fooled,
you will find only their sloughed skin by the roadside.
Published in HerWords, Vol. 1 Number 3, Fall 2020
Suzette: The Magician’s Wife
All those years he pulled rabbits out of hats for you,
waved his wand over your days
before he made himself disappear,
dropped the world he had conjured
outside your door,
let it shatter on the sidewalk.
You took down the oiled canvases you had made
in that abracadabra life,
turned their bright faces to the walls,
replanted the garden with bluebells,
bought new bed linens
in a deep shade of red.
The only rabbits these days are the wild ones
that hide under your hedge.
Each evening you watch them creep out,
with a courage
you’re not sure you have.
On the stark white walls
you hang somber tones, dark colors.
Imaginings trapped deep in your soul
leap from the frames,
hooded figures grab outward
or flee backward into the scene.
No rabbits,
just their holes.
You color your hair with purple streaks,
wear aqua and gold,
wildly patterned socks,
outline your mouth in pink,
your eyes in black kohl.
Your mirror image—
a self-portrait you can no longer paint.
Published in Red Rock Review, Issue 43, Fall 2019