The Women at the Well
by Grace Bauer
ISBN 0-916620-33-6
96 pages $20

Grace Bauer grew up in Northampton, PA, where she began her relevant education at Our Lady of Hungary School. She earned a B.A. from Temple University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She spent several years in New Orleans. Bauer has published three other collections: Where You've Seen Her, The House Where I've Never Lived, and Field Guide to the Ineffable: Poems on Marcel Duchamp.

Bauer has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Irene Leache Poetry Prize, and an Individual Artists Grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

"In The Women at the Well, Bauer sings out of silent alternative stories of the Biblical women she first encountered as a schoolgirl listening to the nuns. Wry humor is only one element of Bauer's illuminating re-vision as she inhabits her women in the longing, sassiness, rebellion, compassion, wavering, and triumph. She lets them like each other - Rachel and Leah reconcile - and lets them relish their bodies. Mary complains about never 'knowing pleasure.' She creates The Prodigal Daughter who, like Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, experiences a vastly different fate from her male counterpart's. But unlike poor Judith, this daughter survives and bears her own girl child. . .I had my favorites among Bauer's women, and you will, too. Whoever they are, the Bible will never be the same." - Carole Simmons Oles, author of Night Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell.