A Certain Ache by Bonnie Wehle
$14.99
A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices is a double boon, because the notes in the book are, by themselves, a treasure of facts about well-known women and women we would do well to know. Their voices are here, rendered in excellent detail, in language groomed and thoughtful, with skill and the kind of attention they deserve. My current favorite is the poem in the voice of Mileva, the scientist who married Albert Einstein. I recommend this book most heartily!
–Marjorie Saiser, author of Learning to Swim
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. Wehle’s verse illuminates these women as they confront “the distortion of spacetime, / our laundry on the line,” persisting through the commonplace and the transcendent alike. “Because / must,” one speaker gasps out amid trials; without denying suffering, Wehle proclaims these women’s drive to create and to endure.
–Julie Swarstad Johnson, author of Pennsylvania Furnace
In these poems, Bonnie Wehle has done one of the most powerful things poems can do: allow us to spend time with the dead. In doing so, she has resurrected something precious: the voices of women who challenged what was possible during their brief lives. These poems are a record of what we must not forget—the human dimensions of their struggle, the beauty of their boldness, and above all, how they manifest a singular, enduring belief.
–Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Description
A Certain Ache
by Bonnie Wehle
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-870-4
2022
Bonnie Wehle grew up in Upstate New York and Tucson, Arizona. Now retired, she worked for many years as an architectural historian and historic preservation consultant. Her poems have been published in Heron Tree Literary Journal, River Heron Review, HerWords/Black Mountain Press, Valey Voices, Red Rock Review, Sky Islands Journal, Metaforología Gaceta Literaria, and elsewhere. Bonnie has enjoyed participating in poetry workshops and classes, both online and in person. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she has served as a docent at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and facilitated a monthly poetry circle in conjunction with the Pima County Library.
Julie Hutslar –
After I reread and finished A Certain Ache I wondered why I loved it so much since I am not usually a big fan of poetry. I realized it was because Bonnie supplied some context. The women, their lives, what made them who they were, what human anguishes they went through and so on. I could relate. And I loved how she added the history in the back. I was familiar with quite a few women, but not all. I really loved it. I felt so tender and empathetic when I laid the book down. 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.
Bonnie Larson Staiger — ND Assoc. Poet Laureate –
Bonnie Wehle introduces nineteen women by their first names. Some are strangers. Some we know. But they all speak to us from and through A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices. We come away with a new knowing and a haunting intimacy through their stories. I, for one, am changed.
Janet McMillan Rives (verified owner) –
Let Bonnie Wehle pull you into the lives of women whose stories are collected in A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices. In these lyrical narrative poems, you will discover familiar women—Frida, Eve, Madame Curie—as well as lesser known voices—Marie Laurencin, Käth Kollwitz, Gertrudis Barceló. When I read these poems for the first time, I wanted to know more. I found just that in the well researched notes at the end of the book. 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.
Katie Sarah Zale –
An opening quote by Arundhati Roy in A Certain Ache: Poems in Women’s Voices suggests that women are not “voiceless” but are “deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” Poets of the persona poem deftly slice open the spirit of the other, slip inside, and speak. 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, yet with the turn of the final page, we, like Molly Bloom, shout “Yes!”