Kevin R. Peterson’s A Poetic Wandering feels much like its title suggests: a long, personal walk through memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the ordinary experiences that accumulate into a life. The collection reaches back to poems from Peterson’s 1980s chapbooks and then moves into work written across the following four decades, so the reader gets something close to a poetic autobiography. Peterson explains that poetry became a way for him to work through emotions, develop self-awareness, reflect on experience, and share what he’d learned, and that purpose remains visible throughout the book. The result is a collection that’s interested less in maintaining a single mood than in recording the things a person notices and carries with him over many years.

The most affecting section is the group of poems drawn from Kendra: A Father’s Feelings. Here Peterson writes about his young daughter’s grave illness, survival, deafness, and the family’s adjustment to a frightening new reality. The poems are plainspoken and emotionally immediate. In “Hospital Paradox,” the birth of one child and the medical crisis of another exist almost side by side, while “Can It Be” captures the complicated mixture of gratitude and sorrow after his daughter survives but loses her hearing. “Roller Skates” then turns a Christmas gift into something far larger, because having their daughter home and alive has changed what the family values. These poems are strong because Peterson trusts the events themselves to carry the emotion. That directness gives the family material an intimacy that stays with you.

Elsewhere, the book widens considerably. Kansas appears again and again through prairie landscapes, pioneers, bison, Dust Bowl memories, sunflowers, local history, and Peterson’s sense of generational connection to the land. Travel adds another dimension, with poems about Yellowstone, Florida, wilderness hiking, canoe country, sunsets, campsites, and the decades-long project of visiting all fifty states with his wife. Nature often becomes a doorway into something spiritual. Peterson says explicitly that it’s where he feels most comfortable and where he most strongly connects with God. There’s also a welcome streak of playfulness, including poems about toilet paper, aging, grilling, and other subjects that keep the collection from becoming uniformly meditative. Near the end, Peterson brings poetry and photography together in what he calls a “poetograph,” combining his own images with brief poetic responses. That makes the closing pages feel like a natural culmination of two lifelong interests.

I’d recommend A Poetic Wandering to readers who enjoy accessible, personal poetry rooted in recognizable experiences rather than poetry that needs to be decoded before it can be felt. It should have particular appeal for Midwestern readers, nature lovers, travelers, parents and grandparents, people interested in family or regional history, and readers who’ve reached an age when looking backward and looking forward begin to happen at the same time. Peterson writes with the perspective of someone interested in preserving memories while he still has the chance to name them, whether those memories involve a hospital room, a Kansas field, a campsite, a marriage, a family tragedy, or a ridiculous question about which way the toilet-paper roll should face. That range is the book’s real character. It reads like one man opening several decades of notebooks and photographs and inviting you to wander through them with him.