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Fundamental Pillars of Life
A Poetic Wandering is a reflective collection spanning four decades in which you explore memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the experiences that shape a life. What role has poetry played in helping you process emotions, develop self-awareness, and make sense of your experiences?
Growing up as an only child, I wasn’t able to compare life experiences or receive guidance from a sibling. There were times I felt lonely, times I felt life was unfair, times when anger reared its ugly head. Writing became a means to document and work through some of life’s instabilities. The process eventually created opportunities for stronger self-confidence and self-esteem.
How has becoming a parent—and later reflecting on family across generations—influenced your poetry?
As one ages, we realize more and more the true importance of faith, family, and friends. I was truly blessed to grow up with parents who believed in these tenets. As parents, my wife and I tried to instill these beliefs in our own children. Sharing these fundamental pillars of life through family generations only makes sense.
Your collection moves comfortably between serious subjects and humorous poems about aging, grilling, toilet paper, and everyday life. Why is humor important to the overall balance of the book?
Poetry should be reflective at times, entertaining at times. I want readers to understand what I am sharing without having to dissect obscure, remote, or hidden meanings. Regarding humor…didn’t Ficino say “Humor Is the Spice of Life.”
What do you hope readers—especially parents, grandparents, travelers, and people reflecting on their own lives—take away from A Poetic Wandering?
I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences, it may help others to BE POETIC themselves.
Author Links: Website
A Poetic Wandering
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.
Ceylon Moon
Ceylon Moon is a poetry collection built around memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the uneasy business of trying to make meaning from a finite life. Aaron Gedaliah organizes the book into five sections that gradually move from childhood and personal recollection into dream life, questions of sanity, imagined voices from the natural world, and finally the experience of growing older. That structure gives the collection a real sense of progression. Early poems such as “I Am Becoming” capture the almost overwhelming vitality of childhood, while later poems look back on youth from a much greater distance. Gedaliah explains in the preface that childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, aging, and the absurdity of life are the central concerns of the book, and those themes keep returning in different forms.
The collection is especially strong when Gedaliah lets an ordinary experience open into something much larger. A toddler running downhill, a morning beside the Mekong, an old temple, a text message from a former lover, a pair of glasses, or a sleepless night can all become occasions for thinking about memory and identity. The poems frequently move between the physical world and an interior one, so landscapes, music, paintings, dreams, and personal recollections seem to talk to one another. That quality is especially vivid in “Ceylon Moon,” where a neglected piece of art becomes almost sentient, carrying with it distant places, submerged memories, and an atmosphere of longing. The language throughout the collection tends toward the sensory and dreamlike, with recurring images of moonlight, water, twilight, trees, music, silence, and shifting shades of blue and violet.
Gedaliah also has a playful philosophical streak, particularly in the “With [in] Sanity” and “The Voices” sections. Poems such as “Being Insane” and “Being in Between” treat sanity and madness less as fixed opposites than as forces people continually negotiate, with conformity on one side and freedom, impulse, and creativity on the other. In “The Voices,” stone, trees, clouds, mountains, and the sea are given their own perspectives, and the effect is surprisingly intimate. Nature becomes a way of talking about stability, memory, surrender, and the human desire to find significance outside ourselves. “A Song of the Sea,” for example, imagines the sea as an ancient rhythm binding us to existence, while “A Song of Letting Go” turns the seasonal loss of leaves into a meditation on accepting time and change.
Toward the end, the collection becomes increasingly concerned with aging, physical decline, estrangement from a more automated world, remembered intimacy, and the approach of death, but it keeps returning to gratitude and connection. “Because My Time Is Limited” places the speaker’s brief life against an immense and indifferent universe, yet arrives at astonishment. The closing poem, “What Is Life?,” reduces the book’s many questions to a simple chain connecting truth, memory, love, and the fragile experiences that give a life its meaning. I’d recommend Ceylon Moon most to readers who enjoy reflective, philosophical poetry and who are drawn to writers such as Rilke, Pessoa, Camus, or poets who use dreams, art, music, and nature as ways of thinking about consciousness. It should especially resonate with readers who’ve reached an age where memory feels less like a record of the past and more like something living alongside the present.
Pages: 84 | ASIN : B0HFQPBLZN
Visual Remembrance
Ain’t the Land is a collection of place-rooted poems that moves through Appalachia town by town, exploring weather, memory, labor, family, faith, hunger, animals, old speech, and stubborn grief. Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
That’s a great question. The first poet that I latched on to during this process of writing the poems was Cynthia Cruz. Her poem “Sparks, Nevada,” published in the May 2014 issue of Poetry Magazine, really floored me. I didn’t discover it until several years afterwards, and I’m not even sure how I came by it, but the imagery, the dream-scape, the sense of loss and mistaken, even unavoidable tragedy stayed with me, and I decided to write an imitation poem titled “Unaka Springs, Tennessee.” A few years later, I found Richard Hugo’s essay, “Triggering Towns,” while doing research for my thesis on the underappreciated yet immense 20th-century Tennessee poet, George Scarbrough. Hugo’s essay explores the importance of the strange town in releasing the poet’s imagination to free language from emotional attachment. And I figured I had been through many of these towns, yet they weren’t my hometown, so I based these poems on what I remembered of the towns, and they sparked my memories from other places, my own family. It really became a sort of visual remembrance in a persona’s voice mingled, as these ventures are, with what Margalit Fox called “the hazy place where truth, fiction, and memory meet.” Maybe because I had just completed my thesis on Scarbrough, I also began to stray from Cruz’s line structuring and utilize what I found in Scarbrough’s poems: embedded classic ballad meter in loosely structured stanza poems. Finally, I was reading E. B. Miles’ naturalist study, Our Southern Birds, and also reading a lot of English ballads recorded in the Southern mountains from the early 20th century during the writing of all 52 poems.
Faith appears throughout the collection, sometimes as comfort and sometimes as something to wrestle with. How has your own spiritual life influenced your poetry?
Oh, I’d say religious imagery is very real and palpable to me, and using it in poetry helps me to understand, or better yet, envision these mythical scenes from antiquity in our century so insistent on the “now.” I remember using the Ezekiel Wheel—that old trope—in a poem (I think it’s “Shouns, Tennessee”), and of course the religious symbolism is clear yet mystical—the Holy Ghost at the center of life (of matter) like a wheel spinning within a wheel. I don’t know why I like re-imagining these mythical scenes from my religion, but I guess it has to do with context, and I guess my poetry is asking, “Is God here?” I remember growing up and singing these famous hymns with elevated scenes of the risen lamb, like stuff out of Revelation. I was stumped. I didn’t want to sing a lie, so my dad recommended that I use my imagination. That helped. I stopped worrying about whether what I sang was what I believed; I started singing to see. I’m trying to just answer off the cuff, like I was hearing you ask me these questions, and this middling attempt may be the best I can offer right now, but it’s a relief to get a question about spirituality as a viable influence on the writing of a poem. An editor once told me that some of the poems in this series were “speculative” because they included religious tropes, and I was tickled pink. Spiritual reality is about as separate from material reality as water systems are “separate” from the land, but I guess we don’t always engage in the less visible systems with fear and trembling.
How did you decide the order of the poems, and did you want readers to experience them as a journey through Appalachia?
I took the cue for the poems’ organization from their form. I figured I had pairs of lines in couplets, so I should look for echoes between poems and join them up in a sort of journey through the seasons in three series or years. Since the book was mostly drafted in a three-year period, there are several distinct groups of poems on the same season yet with different tones. Yet the poems are not chronological, maybe chthonological–organized by earth, not time. So, there endf up being “pairings” throughout the collections—poems in close proximity with similar topics, images, referents, etc. As I was submitting the poems to periodicals and literary magazines, I started to notice how I was favoring the idea of certain of them going toward the front or toward the end, and so on. A friend and great poet, Jesse Graves, recommended that the poem “Duffield, Virginia” be the first poem, and I liked that idea, so I did it. He said that the highway scene of the poem would complement the tone of the book—vignettes or visitations. The reader is more like the pilgrim in contrast to the voices in the poems, which are staid. I wouldn’t call this a tour. Many of the places included in the book aren’t what you might call destinations—out of the way for many, even dyed-in-the-wool Appalachians.
What do you hope readers who have never visited Appalachia will come away understanding after reading Ain’t the Land?
I have to remind myself that I’m not an Appalachian poet writing poetry to advance the region or its customs. I’m a poet above all else, and the poem is the ends and the means, but in many ways, these poems are more rural or remote. That being said, a lot of my neighbors are thoughtful people, but they don’t always think about things that have broad appeal to “average” Americans (of course, this is just my impression after watching the nightly news these some odd years). So, I guess you could say that the concerns or topics of the poems don’t have broad appeal. If someone struggles to feel relevant when they journey through arcanus, they would do well to spare themselves from my little book. However, if a reader enjoys the occasional break from our self-obsessed, technocratic, newfangled age, then these poems may have something to offer. A friend of mine told me that he likes to go to the woods for fun to bike, camp, hike, you name it, and he told me that when he read these town poems, he was “in the woods,” which is the sort of compliment that I am sure I will never be able to fully fathom or appreciate.
Author Links: Website
Within and Without
Within and Without, by James Richard Hansen, is a compact poetry collection built around attention to: morning light, ocean sounds, music, dreams, grief, love, and the strange private weather of the mind. The book begins in quiet observation, with poems that often use nature as a doorway into reflection. In “Dawn,” Hansen writes, “Every nuance of tree and flower, / breeze and glittering light, / shows the way to freedom,” and that line captures much of the collection’s spirit. These poems are less about dramatic turns than about noticing what’s already there and letting it open into feeling.
The first half of the book moves between landscape and inner life with a steady, meditative rhythm. The Pacific, rain, moonlight, fire, trees, and stars appear again and again, not as decoration, but as companions to thought. In poems like “Oceanic Events,” “Finding My Stride,” “Catharsis,” and “Peace,” Hansen uses the natural world to describe the self coming into focus. His images are clear and accessible, and the poems often feel like moments from a walk, a window, or a quiet evening that slowly become something more personal.
There’s also a recurring sense of struggle in the collection, but it’s handled with restraint. “Serpent,” “Reconciliation,” “Night,” and “Internal Itinerary” bring in fear, loneliness, frustration, and spiritual searching, yet the book keeps returning to renewal. Hansen’s speakers look inward without getting stuck there. Even when a poem begins in heaviness, it often finds a small source of steadiness: dawn, music, rain, or the act of looking closely. That makes the collection feel honest without becoming bleak.
The second section, Love Poems to Kristen, gives the book a more intimate center. These poems are direct, affectionate, and openly devoted, moving from desire to gratitude to long-term commitment. The language is sometimes grand, but it’s grounded by the sense that these are poems written for a real person over real years, including birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day. One of the loveliest moments comes in “Reverie,” where the speaker misses the green flash at sunset and concludes, “But the idea was enough.” That small realization says a lot about the section’s emotional world: memory, love, and anticipation can be as vivid as the event itself.
Within and Without is a sincere and reflective collection about perception, healing, wonder, and devotion. Hansen’s poems are plainspoken in a way that makes them easy to enter, and their best moments come when a natural image and an inward feeling meet cleanly on the page. It’s a book for readers who enjoy poetry that’s contemplative, emotionally open, and rooted in everyday encounters with beauty. The title fits well, since the collection keeps moving between the outer world of sky, sea, rain, and light, and the inner world of memory, longing, faith, and love.
Pages: 64 | ASIN : B0794GLD97
Ain’t the Land
Ain’t the Land, by William Rieppe Moore, is a collection of place-rooted poems that moves through Appalachia town by town, from Duffield and Boone Gap to Tellico Plains and Bluffton, gathering weather, memory, labor, family, faith, hunger, animals, old speech, and stubborn grief into a single rough-hewn music. The poems feel less like postcards from a region than like weathered boards pulled from an old barn, each one holding a different stain of rain, blood, smoke, sunlight, or sorrow. Again and again, Moore writes from the charged border between belonging and estrangement, where the land is beloved but not romanticized, where beans are picked, hens are killed, fires are built, and the past keeps breathing under the floorboards.
What struck me most was how alive the language feels. Moore’s voice has a wild, bristling confidence, full of Appalachian idiom, biblical echo, botanical precision, and sudden surreal turns. I loved the way a road becomes “a crow ribbon cut loose” in “Duffield, Virginia,” or how the speaker in “Can Lot, Tennessee” can move from Saturn and Jupiter to wanting “a crosscut saw and a man to go with it” without the poem feeling strained. That mix of cosmic scale and woodstove practicality is one of the book’s great pleasures. The diction can be dense, but I found that fitting. These poems aren’t trimmed hedges. They’re briars, bean vines, creek banks, and smoke. You have to push into them a little, and they leave scratches.
Moore is writing about land, but he’s also writing about inheritance, class, ecological loss, faith, violence, and the uneasy dignity of people who know how to make do. In “Fords Branch, Kentucky,” the plea for the “great upland” to speak before places become “the poetry of was” hit me hard because it names one of the collection’s deepest fears: that whole ways of living can vanish into elegy before anyone has properly listened. I also appreciated that the book doesn’t flatten rural life into sweetness. There’s tenderness here, but also cruelty, like the flock eating the cracked last egg in “Almira, Kentucky,” or the possums and shotguns in “Stoney Creek, Tennessee.” Those moments hurt, and they should. They give the collection moral weight.
I came away from Ain’t the Land feeling that I’d been led through a landscape where everything has a voice, even rot, weather, tools, birds, and old sayings. It’s a rewarding collection if you like poetry with muscle, mud, strangeness, and soul. Moore’s writing can be thorny, but it’s thorny because it’s alive and because it refuses to make the mountains merely pretty. I’d recommend this book to readers who enjoy contemporary poetry rooted in place, especially those drawn to Appalachian literature, ecological memory, folk speech, and poems that sound like they were made by someone listening closely to both the dead and the dirt underfoot.
Pages: 64
The Creative Way
The Creative Way is a compact, image-driven portrait of Steven B. Wills as a photographer and digital artist, tracing how his work grows out of nature, travel, memory, illness, recovery, grief, and curiosity. The book moves between biographical reflection and visual catalog, showing Wills’s fondness for landscapes, coastal scenes, wildlife, skyscapes, urban structures, abstract color experiments, and images. What emerges is less a conventional art book than a personal archive of creative momentum, where a phone camera, photo-editing apps, and a searching eye become tools for turning ordinary sights into bright, emotionally charged images.
What I appreciated most was the sincerity running through the book. There’s something quietly moving about the way Wills frames creativity as a way of surviving and noticing. The section on Bodie structures stayed with me because the ghost town’s “arrested decay” feels like a natural extension of the book’s deeper ideas about resilience and remembrance. The image made for a friend who passed away in May adds a tender human ache to the collection, while the self-portrait near the end gives the whole project a disarming intimacy. I liked that the book doesn’t try to hide the artist behind polish. It lets us see the maker, the process, the experiments, and the emotional weather behind the images.
The writing is plainspoken, sometimes repetitive, and occasionally reads more like notes for a curated portfolio than a finished narrative. That looseness has its own charm. The language keeps circling back to nature, digital tools, healing, and transformation, and those repetitions begin to feel like the book’s heartbeat. The ideas are strongest when they’re paired with the art itself: the red-and-black image generated from two colors, the vivid lighthouse with its stained-glass intensity, the bear in the canoe beside the deer, the moody coastal and moonlit scenes. I found the mix of photography, filters, and AI both intriguing and a little uneven, but that unevenness also makes the book feel alive. It’s an artist’s workshop with the door left open.
I came away from The Creative Way feeling that I had spent time with someone who genuinely needs to create, not for spectacle, but for steadiness, wonder, and connection. The book is imperfect in structure, but generous in spirit, and its best moments carry a warm sense of gratitude for beauty wherever it appears. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy personal art collections, digital photography, outsider art, nature-inspired imagery, and creative journeys shaped by resilience and emotional honesty.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0GR1ZQL68
Faith and Nature Are Woven Together
God’s Plants centers around three children and their great-grandparents as they share the day discovering “biblical plant signs” placed among flowers, herbs, vegetables, and trees. What inspired you to write this book for young readers?
I’m a 75-year-old first-time published author. proud great-grandmother of 7 beautiful great-grandchildren, I was inspired to write this book for them and for all GOD’s young readers. My husband suggested I build on the biblical plant signs we made. I researched a list of 66 biblical plant signs for my graduation project to become a Certified Gardener. The list is included in the back of the book. I actually have a greenhouse and even the Crown of Thorns plant. The only way to write about biblical plant signs is to introduce the Bible, GOD, and Jesus. God’s Plants provides a unique way to see how faith and nature are woven together.
Why is it important for children to see connections between faith and the natural world?
Biblical plants are usually overlooked when reading the Bible. GOD’S PLANTS will give readers an awareness of how nature is intertwined with faith. Plus, the book is a great way to introduce the Bible, GOD, and Jesus.
What do you think children learn differently from grandparents than they do from parents or teachers?
As a great-grandmother, I wish I could have done many things differently when raising my son. But now I can reflect on my past experiences and share them with my great- grandchildren so they can learn from my mistakes. Today’s parents are busy living in the moment, while teachers are teaching what is needed to live a fruitful life. Grand and great-grandparents can provide real-life occurrences that will help shape a child’s behavior and values.
All my books will have messages I would communicate to my great-grandchildren, and they can pass on. By publishing my books, I hope to connect with other families and children.
What was the most rewarding part of creating GOD’s Plants?
Being able to bring to life, in GOD’S PLANTS, the awareness and beauty of biblical plants. And sharing where they are found in the Bible from my list of 66 biblical plants. (And there are more.) But most of all, introducing the Bible, GOD, and Jesus to the young readers, and making this a joyful family book reading opportunity.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
