Elise Hempel grew up in suburban Chicago and has worked as an editor, proofreader, copywriter and university English instructor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Measure, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Midwest Quarterly, as well as in Poetry Daily and Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Write Prize in Poetry and the 2016 String Poet Prize. Her full-length collection of poems, Second Rain, is available from Able Muse Press. She lives in central Illinois.

Other poems by Elise Hempel in Verse Daily:
March 10, 2019:   "Bride and Groom" "In the shifting afternoon's dim gray..."

Books by Elise Hempel:

Other poems on the web by Elise Hempel:
"The Operation"
"Northwoods"
Four poems
"As My Daughter Leaves"
Two poems
"The Transfer"
"Gramps"
"Dirt Roads"
"Mosaic"

Elise Hempel's Website.

Elise Hempel According to Wikipedia.

Elise Hempel on Twitter.

About Ache:

"Elise Hempel's Ache tells of the devastating disconnect between the desire to communicate and the inability to do so due to intervening time, distance, reticence, and technology. These are well-crafted, plainspoken remembrances, clearly the result of what William Shakespeare calls 'sessions of sweet silent thought,' woven into tales of loss, regret, aging and death. All is not darkness, however. In poems such as 'Blind Dates Back Then' and 'A Voice Mail' we get a glimpse of humor as it relates to the written and spoken communication. Hempel's poems about her family will warm your heart...or break it."
—Catherine Chandler