Tracing Lines is a poetry collection about learning to see life as a set of sacred, intersecting paths: through nature, grief, homesickness, prayer, memory, and ordinary hilarity. Lori Hershberger moves between the mountains and rivers of Thailand, the prairie winds of Kansas, the ache of leaving and returning, and the steady presence of faith beneath it all. The book begins with the idea that human creativity is a kind of tracing, not creation from nothing, but a grateful following of lines already given. That image holds the whole collection together. Whether she is lying small in a cradle of pine needles, watching floods swallow roads and homes, missing the “little white mother” across the world, or laughing over stolen cheese and Sunday Smarties, Hershberger keeps returning to the same quiet conviction: to notice deeply is to be alive.

What I liked most about this collection is how emotionally unguarded it feels without becoming shapeless. The poems have a devotional core, but they’re not thin or merely comforting. Grief is allowed to be strange, physical, even morally uncomfortable, as in “Some Other Person’s Grief,” where the speaker admits the frightening selfishness inside her first prayer after a motorcycle accident. That moment stayed with me because it’s so human. Hershberger is at her strongest when she lets beauty and sorrow touch without smoothing either one down. In “Mothwings,” the rains bring the earth back to life just as death arrives from the other side of the world, and the broken wings on the porch become almost unbearable in their delicacy. I felt that same hush in “Delta 7850,” where lost hours on a flight become minutes mingled with tears in “God’s bathroom cabinet.” It’s a risky image, almost oddly domestic, but it works because it makes heaven feel intimate rather than ornamental.

The writing itself is lush. Hershberger loves repetition, personification, rivers, wind, dusk, birds, and the long ache of distance, and I admired the musical confidence of that recurring language. When the concrete detail anchors the lyric impulse, the work sings. I loved the yellow cat beside the coffee, the cabbages tumbling from trucks in Mae Hong Son, the mother slowly spelling love into a text message, the farmhouse phone of the past ringing into static. Those details make the larger spiritual ideas feel earned. The humor in the final section also surprised me in the best way. After so much ache and altitude, “Life” with its goats, ants, spilled lemonade, and stubborn picnic blanket feels like a deep breath from someone who knows that joy is not the opposite of sorrow, but one of its bravest companions.

Tracing Lines felt to me like a book written by someone who has lived with two homes in her body and has learned to make poetry from the pull between them. It’s tender, sincere, sometimes ornate, often beautiful, and most memorable when it trusts small things to carry enormous feeling. I closed it with the sense of having been invited to look harder at my own ordinary lines, the weathered ones and the golden ones alike. I’d recommend this collection to readers who enjoy faith-inflected poetry, nature writing, reflective poems about place and belonging, and work that treats grief with reverence while still leaving room for cats, mangoes, and laughter.

Pages: 121 | ASIN: B0GTGCT8Y7