Little Altars is a poetic meditation on memory’s delicate nature, where grief, resilience, and renewal intertwine. With a voice both tender and unflinching, the author offers profound insights into the journey of reclaiming oneself in the present moment. Themes of loss and transformation shape this deeply reflective work, making it an essential read for anyone who has grappled with memory’s weight and discovered beauty in moving forward.
In these well-crafted poems about memory, loss, and rediscovery Bonnie Wehle explores the tension between the desire to hide oneself and the need to understand why we are who we are. It’s not an easy journey, filled as it is with regrets and family secrets: it’s a struggle, using “field glasses slung as weaponry.” In language as evocative as the memories, with imagery and structure creating layers of discovery and delight, she carries us with her as she pieces the self together to arrive at a place of balance and wholeness, though perhaps an uneasy one, and ultimate recognition of the need to give voice to this journey—“O, silence in need of sound.”
—Charity Everitt, author of Translation from the Ordinary
In Bonnie Wehle’s Little Altars, we stop at her shrines and explore her “truth buried in a metaphor.” Wehle lyrically crafts stories of a family with “mouthfuls of moist peach flesh, / conveniently quashing speech,” a mother “choosing sadness over joy,” a father intent on teaching his daughter to clean a squirming fish, and we encounter the poet, a young woman “trying to rudder to safety.” Within this tapestry of stories, “Memories endure / no matter how / far you try / to push / them away,” and lucky for the reader of Little Altars, Wehle has created a collection of poetry to hold these incisive memories.
—Janet McMillan Rives, author of Thread: A Memoir in Woven Poems and On Horsebarn Hill
“A thick impasto of bold colors,” could describe Bonnie Wehle’s new collection, Little Altars. But the pigments are not laid on so thickly that they obscure the canvas. Yes, there are secrets here, but you must read between the lines. Of course, as the poet reminds us, “there are perils in revealing ourselves to others.” She tells us that each poem is a shrine on which she gathers what survives— “forgotten fragments buried deep…from the wall of an old mine.” Like the memory of that little girl “carving words” into the family table “with a groundhog’s tooth.”
—Gene Twaronite, poet and author of Death at the Mall and The Museum of Unwearable Shoes
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
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, author of 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, author In Plains Sight