Little Altars

By Bonnie Wehle

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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1639806768
• ISBN13: 9781639806768
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: Kelsay Books
• Length: 48 Pages
• Weight: 0.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"