A Thousand Miles of Poetry

 

A Thousand Miles of Poetry: Poemwalking Wisconsin’s National Ice Age Trail
Katrina Serwe
 
 
Wisconsin Writers Association Press, April 1, 2026, 220 pp
7.99 ebook
29.99 paperback
39.99 hardcover
 
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About the Book
Wisconsin's Ice Age National Scenic Trail is a dream woven in single-track, multi-use, bike trails, and back roads. It's tacked together through shared public spaces, private lands and easements. Every year the trail gains miles toward the goal of uninterrupted path ribboning off-road over 1,200 miles of Wisconsin's glacial terrain.In this evocative poetry collection, poet, hiker, and outdoor enthusiast Katrina Serwe traces a thousand-mile odyssey along the Ice Age Trail, each segment etched into verse. Poemwalking, as Serwe describes it, captures the trail's pulse across every season, woven into reflections, layered metaphors, and the whispers of ancient moraines. These poems, like the glacial till that inspired them, walk the reader over the rugged and gentle landscapes of Wisconsin, shaped by the energy and ice of long ago.
 
My review:
Poetry, like hiking, is an experience best served in chapters, much like each segment of Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail in this new book that combines the art of walking and observing. Serwe's loving tribute to Wisconsin's National Ice Age Trail through poetry will bring you back over and over to explore the trail which are is the process of being established along the edge of the last glacier advance across the state. Some segments hard to traverse, some easy walking, some through cities and some on rough terrain where you can get lost without signs. Full of insight and self-discovery, the poetry will carry you along, as "I would give you a trail / wide enough / to navigate with ease / and close enough / for nature to touch you / in spiderweb and leaf tickles" from “When You Are Stressed” and the pleasure of finding new friends from "I Remember": Let’s go make a trail friend! / It’s not that easy, I say. She laughs, of course it is— / if they’re on the same trail as you, they’re your friend!" Not just for poetry lovers and hiking enthusiasts, A Thousand Miles of Poetry will teach you something about Wisconsin and maybe even push you into poemwalking your own neighborhood. The book includes maps and background information on the trail and creating poetry.
 
About the Author
Katrina Serwe, PhD, worked as a therapist, professor, and researcher in the field of occupational therapy for over two decades. She started writing poetry after a transcendent midlife crisis brought her back to her love of literature, art, and nature. Her first collection of poetry, First Steps (Brain Mill Press), was published in 2025. Her poems have been featured in a variety of publications such as The Solitary Plover, Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Portage Magazine, and Scrawl Place. Serwe's awards include the Jade Ring in poetry (Wisconsin Writers Association, 2024) and the Muse Prize (Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, second place, 2025). Her favorite pastime is a made-up hobby she calls poemwalking. You can follow her journey at www.katrinaserwe.com.

Review of poetry What the Current Cannot Swallow

 

Review of What the Current Cannot Swallow by Debra Hall
 
December 15, 2025, 43 pp
Poetry (Chapbook)
Paperback, $10; Ebook $3.99
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About the Book:

What the Current Cannot Swallow is a soulful collection of poetry that traverses the vast and intimate geography of love, illness, caregiving, and mourning. Set primarily between Rome and the American Midwest, Debra Hall's poems move through embassy lines, a hospital on the Tiber, catacombs, hospice rooms, mountain trails, and a family kitchen. Hall attends to small, exact particulars-a deli counter, bear bells, a peppermint, a rosary, hail at the window, a grandson's birth-and lets them carry the weight of what cannot be said. The work stays close to the body and to the world. The pieces in it mark a crossing, and the daily work of living in the aftermath of survival.

My Review:  

When the dedication is a twist of joy, you know you’re in for a fulfilling experience.

Readers join the author in a fugue of exhaustion as a couple experiences medical crisis in the opening poems: “she (the case worker) warns me not to be so dark,” the author shares in “Flight Risk”; and “the hospital staff is anxious / for us to go home,” she writes in “A Welcome Overstayed.” The twenty-three prose poems set mostly in couplets and short stanzas tumble love and worry across the page. Many of the poems follow the experiences of filling last dreams of travel; revelation; desperation for healing as in the poem “Sacrament,” which holds the title line; and prayers for “a little more time” in “La Pieta.” A muse about how life might have been different made me smile when the author hints living in my hometown of Racine in “Danish Kringle,” with its “chewy almond paste” that persuaded “us to stay.”

Both the dignity of death and indignity of well-meaning advice when “the social worker had  / confused the order of magnitude / prepared me for the aftershock / not the blast” poignantly remind us that death is a unique experience. A dribble of peace comes through in “Legacy” where the author promises to keep Grandpa’s memory: “we will find your spirit there / and he will know your name Grandpa.”

The poem that spoke to me most was “Bear Bells,” in which the author grabs an experience to hold: “I try to remember why I / agreed to a trip more rugged / than romantic, yet saw a chance / to map your wilderness, find / a branch that holds the things you / guard under tooth and claw.”

What the Current Cannot Swallow is a beautiful tribute to a precious partner whose “spirit dances in ripples” and is truly immortalized.

The well-done prose poems will resonate with those who keep memory alive.

A Thousand Miles of Poetry review

 

A Thousand Miles of Poetry: Poemwalking Wisconsin’s Ice Age National Scenic Trail
Katrina Serwe
 
Poetry
Publication April 1, 2026 from Wisconsin Writers Association Press
5.5 by 8.5 inches, 200 pages
$29.99 – paper   $7.99 ebook   $39.99  Hardcover
 
ISBN paper: 979-8-3493-2254-9  ISBN hardcover: 979-8-3493-4121-2
ISBN ebook: 979-8-3493-2255-6
Subjects: Poetry/ Animals & Nature; Place; Motivational & Inspirational

About the Book: In this evocative poetry collection, poet, hiker, and outdoor enthusiast Katrina Serwe traces a thousand-mile odyssey along the Ice Age Trail, each segment etched into verse. Poemwalking, as Serwe describes it, captures the trail’s pulse across every season woven into recollections, layered metaphors, and the whispers of ancient moraines. These poems, like the glacial till that inspired them walk the reader over the rugged and gentle landscapes of Wisconsin shaped by the energy and ice of long ago.

About the author, Katrina Serwe

Katrina Serwe, PhD, worked as a therapist, professor, and researcher in the field of occupational
therapy for over two decades. She started writing poetry after a transcendent midlife crisis brought her back to her love of literature, art, and nature. Her first collection of poetry, First Steps (Brain Mill Press), was published in 2025. Her poems have been featured in a variety of publications such as The Solitary Plover, Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Portage Magazine, and Scrawl Place. Serwe’s awards include the Jade Ring in poetry (Wisconsin Writers Association, 2024) and the Muse Prize (Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, second place, 2025). Her favorite pastime is a made-up hobby she calls poemwalking. You can follow her journey at www.katrinaserwe.com.or scan the QR code.

Jim Landwehr's Review

A Thousand Miles of Poetry is a multi-faceted collection of both beauty and experience. As I read it, it seemed to shapeshift between a travelogue journal, a chronicling of personal achievement, and a documenting of the diverse and wild Wisconsin landscapes. Inside its pages, readers are invited to walk alongside Serwe as she winds her way over the hills and flatlands, past farms, lakes, forests and bogs, in all sorts of weather.

As a person who spent 37 years in mapping and Geographic Information Systems, I appreciate the way the book is structured around seven different sections of the trail. Each section begins with an image taken from the trail that gives the reader a sense of geographic place. Perhaps more importantly, each section also includes a trail segment map labeled with key natural and cultural features. These segments are also displayed in statewide overview maps that help the reader visualize where these poems were written in relation to surrounding counties and the state borders.

But all of this is secondary to the stunning imagery Serwe conjures as she steps her way through mud, across rocks and roots, and over eskers, moraines, and drumlins. As she pushes herself to complete each segment, she writes as part of her daily ritual to record the sights, sounds, and feelings of Wisconsin’s wild landscape.

For example, in “What Comes Next” she highlights the birds and their songs that accompany her and perk her ears.

I close my eyes to the smog and listen—
flicker, robin, rose-breasted grosbeak.
Follow the soundscape through maple shade—
hairy woodpecker, gray catbird, field sparrow.

These vignettes are observations that strike and penetrate the soul of the hiker, sometimes catching her by surprise. But enmeshed with her description of the wildlife, Serwe pays homage to the landscape as well. She eloquently describes how she sees and hears it using poetic prose. In “Inspiring Voice” she writes:

…And I listen to water
as it plays on the rocks downstream where it winds
behind willow and carves its deep ribbons on sand.

Serwe’s sensory-rich narrative pulls us into her journey and makes us a partner with her as she encounters Wisconsin’s abundant natural resources, its diverse wildlife, and the restorative qualities she finds in the quiet of the countryside. She is an evangelist for the environment and reminds us we are mere visitors in a larger ecosystem. This symbiotic relationship is exemplified in “Love is like Mycelia,” where she takes us deeper into understanding the natural cycle of life.

Down underground they are there,
in a network that’s always connecting—
words between roots of the trees,
and the taste of the sun’s sugars shared.

As an avid outdoorsman, I have always been intrigued about the challenges and resulting sense of accomplishment of those who have hiked the entire Ice Age Trail. This 1000+ mile “Poemwalk,” as Serwe so appropriately titles it, gives inquiring minds a sense for both the cost and rewards when undertaking such a formidable quest. I commend Serwe’s perseverance, her keen insights, and her aptitude for wrapping it all up in the beauty of her poetry; poetry she carried with her every step of the way. A Thousand Miles of Poetry is a fantastic collection for any lover of poetry, the outdoors, or both.

About the Reviewer:

Jim Landwehr, author of Tea in the Pacific Northwest, Thoughts from a Line at the DMV, Genetically Speaking, and more. For more on his writing, visit www.jimlandwehr.com

Jim loves outdoor sports including, biking, kayaking, canoeing, camping, and fishing. It was his love of camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota that led him to write Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir. The book features humorous accounts of trips he took to the area with his brothers, friends, and children over the past twenty-five years.

Writing Dirty Shirt sparked his lifelong interest in writing and he has since published three other memoirs and six books of poetry. He has a forthcoming short story collection, All That It Seems, (Cornerstone Press). Jim is retired and spends much of his time writing and fishing in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Wisconsin Writers Association and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. He was the 2018/2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin.

New poetry Aging in Place by Lynn Aprill

Aging in Place

Lynn Aprill
Water's Edge Press LLC (April 15, 2025)
Poetry‎40 pages

ISBN-13: ‎978-1-952526-25-1‎

Print $12

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Upon retirement, find them, become them

Those women who have time to go to the Y during the day, the poet says…those women are just finding their new place in life after age sixty, which feels like the new forty in Lynn Aprill’s latest book of clever, poignant, frank verse. It’s our job to jump in the deep end of aging and sink or swim.

Aprill uses form with relish, a zuihitsu checklist of the things we all have forgotten at one time or another; often multiple times during the day. I thought I lost my passport the other day and spent a half hour cleaning out old files anyway. In a sijo, we inhale the aroma of new grandson; in villanelle, the gradual realization that the everywhere of another’s discomfort, of pain, is now ours. It hurts everywhere, our shared nightmare. Couplets, three-line and five-line stanzas, glorious freeform, the poems are uncompromising in their poke at life, hazy memories fragmenting, the thought of what we once enjoyed, the drama of what we’re becoming.

Written in two segments with an epilogue poem, Aprill gradually guides us toward reconciliation with dreams of the house we hold until we die, the habits of a lifetime of ordering a suit every year, of visiting familiar places; the ravages of stroke, dementia, rehab we always hope is temporary. A favorite is a Boomer Pitch for a popular television reality show in which the reality is not just growing food, but preparing, preserving, herding it…while taking care of yard and the prize spouse.

A final thought in For My Daughter is a pause for all of us—how will I age? What will I remember…and forget?

Aging in Place is a thoughtful, beautifully drawn picture of who we are, will be, and once were.
Poetry lovers will return to read these poems over and over.

New poetry The Worried Well

 

The Worried Well by Anthony Immergluck

Autumn House, April 8, 2025
Poetry
120 pp
Paperback, ebook, $16.95
Buy on Bookshop.org

About the book:

The Worried Well, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is a tragicomic collection that explores the intersection of anxiety and safety in a chaotic world.

Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?

The "worried well" is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that don't manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.

Despite the profound subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor, grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, "I don't / know why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give / the worry a name and then / to call it again and again."

My review:

Immergluck’s collection in The Worried Well consists of 48 poems in two sections, The Worry, The Well. The first section is made of poems of zealous melodrama, some wry and self-aggrandizing, such as Narcissus at the Pharmacy in which the author is concerned about his legacy. The opening piece, “Worry (the Dybbuk),” is a tribute to life today, focusing on worry, worry, worry: I worry that were we to / land on an island without / worry our worries would / starve or worse, survive… In “Deadsong” the author poses 17 short segments of verse about manners of death that range from drastic to fantastic, poignant to manic: crashes, drugs, old and famous, martyrdom, skateboarding…lots of fun with asides; I can hear the stanzas in the voice of Gene Wilder. Likewise, the droll wit of “Social Studies”: “In the end we all become whoever was nice to us when we were fifteen,” I hear in the voice of Billy Collins.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope in these tributes to concern, such as in “Burden of Care” in which the author finds some reversal of dread: But I don’t want to think / about my body anymore. / I want to learn Spanish / for real and for good. / I want to watch all day / for waterbirds / and run to tell my wife.

Included are poems of illness, about surgeons dropping lines, about Hospital Art: And I have learned to love the textiles / donated by the synagogue. I have / made peace with the tulips. Who doesn’t love a poem that combines palliative care, Rachel Maddow, Polaroid, Jello-O, and isthmus in contemplation? Intermingled are poem memories of grandparents – patience with Grandpa at the end of his life as they attempt to navigate the Lord of the Rings, and finding courageous Grandma taking back the life of her son who thought he should enlist in the army at age thirteen; another found letter from an earlier generation.

In the second part, the Well, a collection of memories such as a childhood home, dumpster-diving for a memorable sofa (And you should hear the song it sings / when both our weights are lain upon it.), margaritas in a Nalgene in a tent in the rain…the reader engages with more lyric and rhythmic language; even forgiveness in “Mise En Place”: Because she loves me, / we do not address the / rawness in the center. / She eats it all / and so do I.

Self-reflection is also a major theme of the poetry in this section. The authors shares the raw emotional distress of fatherhood in “Bus Stop”; the worry of being enough, of being able to love a baby.

The Worried Well is a beautiful collection of frayed humanity, of culture, memories, loss and living for the future which will enchant poetry lovers. One of my favorite parts is the dedication, which you’ll have to read for yourself.

About the author: Anthony Immergluck is a poet and publishing professional with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from NYU-Paris. His work has been widely published in journals including Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly. In his free time, Anthony is a passionate traveler and hiker. He’s also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter when no one is watching. Originally from the Chicago area, he now lives with his wife and pit bull in Madison, WI. The author states on his website that 50% proceeds to the ACLU. https://www.immergluckpoetry.com/

 

Restoring Prairie by Margaret Rozga

 

Restoring Prairie

Margaret Rozga
Poetry, 94 pp
May 6, 2024, Cornerstone Press
$21.95 paper
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About the Book

"Restoring Prairie, a beautifully unified collection of new poems by Margaret Rozga,  addresses ecological and cultural history based on personal engagement with farmland being restored with prairie species. The poet’s emotional, philosophical and spiritual engagement with the place lend tremendous depth. Contemplating the pendulum of destruction and renewal, she juxtaposes poems of hope with laments for the extent of centuries of development, leaving a mere shadow of historic natural bounty. Other forms of grief are intertwined including the loss of loved ones as well as relentless warfare and the ongoing pandemic. Each adds moral complexity while heightening the impact of the collection. This book can be read as a hymn and prayer for healing, an act of conscience and a journey of the heart, calling above all for the courage to hope."

~ Dr. Christian Knoeller, Professor Emeritus of English, Purdue University Author of Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change

 My Review

Former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga invites us to join her in a poignant, sensual, visceral year writing at a prairie restoration project. In celebrating the past and present, emotion, acceptance and forgiveness, she teaches us be at home in our own company. These eighty-plus poems in five sections are a plein-air experience using nature for prompts in the appearance of a yellow jacket stopping on a page, a maple wildly flinging seeds, the perfect rendition of a sandhill crane call and onomatopoetry of others, as the author walks and sits and journals on the prairie.

Mining every sense from the touch of ancient tree bark to the taste of yesterday’s coffee, with a nod to punctuation in “where on the prairie,” Rozga’s luscious comingling of words such as “then and then-ner…ephemeral then-ness” add a piquant melody to her lyricism in “English Sparrow.” Clever spacing and staccato rhythm controls the reader’s breath in poems like “Power.”

Mostly prose poetry, stories shaped through imagery, some very short form observances in the delight of the moment, Restoring Prairie is also a call to action. Rozga says in her introduction, “Restoring what was lost may start small, but start all the same. On the unfarmed old railroad bed, look carefully. Find enduring prairie grass and wildflower seeds. Gather them. Plant them. Each fall more seeds. The prairie the settlers broke begins slowly to take root again.”

Rozga’s activism shows in the second grouping of poems about protecting land, protecting memories, an ode to Robert Parris Moses, and reluctant protest not-poems; the ebb and flow of “Remembering Beauty”: a time before settlement when visitors were rare and awed by the land of prairie and river.

Hope is one the major themes woven throughout the book; hope in renewal of the blooming prairie when the rest of life was caught up in the pandemic; hope for the future, for moving on and forgiving, and listening. Hope is in the realization that one can find a comfortable place when life changes: “I am the…person speaking…as well, the one spoken to” in “You Are Not Here,” and growth in “Field Staton in April.”

Spend a year with the beauty of the prairie, reflecting on the seasons of emergence, growth, sleep, rebirth. Restoring Prairie is a magical journey through time and memory outside of ourselves using mindfulness (underrated), nostalgia, hope, and the music of the created.

About the Author

University of Wisconsin - Waukesha Professor of English Emerita Dr. Margaret Rozga creates poetry from her ongoing concern for social justice issues. She was a participant in Milwaukee’s marches for fair housing and later married civil rights leader, Father James Groppi. As part of the 50th anniversary projects honoring Milwaukee’s fair housing marches, Dr. Rozga served as editor of a poetry chapbook anthology, Where I Want to Live: Poems for Fair and Affordable Housing. Also as part of the 50th anniversary events, she convened a housing task force that supported the successful initiative to close a loophole in Milwaukee County’s fair housing law so that it now covers people with rent assistance vouchers. She writes monthly columns for the Los Angeles Art News and Milwaukee Neighborhood News. She leads poetry and journaling workshops and serves as a civil rights consultant to community organizations.

 

Poetry from RB Simon

 This review originally appeared at Wisconsin Writers Association.

The Good Truth by RB Simon, Madison

Poetry, 40 pp

July 2, 2021, Finishing Line Press, KY

Paperback, $18.80

Buy on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Good-Truth-R-B-Simon/dp/1646625382/

About the Book:

In her debut collection, poet R.B. Simon paints a compelling canvas of identity one poem at a time. With evocative, lyrical language, these poems of loss, identity, and ultimately recovery, show that the complex fabric of our lives often weaves together something more beautiful than we could foresee. The Good Truth offers an accessible and poignant look at the forging of a woman through hardship and alienation, and her quiet, forceful return to the home of herself. The Good Truth is that each one of can join her on the journey.

 

My Review:

Simon’s opening biographical poem “Heritage” sets the table for the reader. With its starkness of the opening line and lyricism of internal time and space as its own dimension, we are drawn deeply into our own childhood angst, sharing our trauma with the poet, no matter who we are or how we existed. Any author of any genre who can pull us into her world is an artist. Simon’s art exposes the grit, love, and wonder of who and why she is, and begs us, her readers, to do the same.

 

“who are you, little i?” spoke to me through the questions of “who are you” from those outside, to the poignant self-wonderment of “who can you become?” Everyone who has hidden under the blanket or in a closet with a flashlight and read till your eyes bled knows how to escape into anyone else’s world but your own.

 

The 23 poems of The Good Truth are written in prose style, some speak in syncopation and several undulate across the page as they weave tales of discovery, humiliation, joy, resignation, despair, and acceptance. Phrases like “stacked facial muscles into a good morning” from “anything to keep you happy” and “the sound of infinity” from “Retreat” make me sigh in contemplation and revelation. The poem “Indelible” makes me want to make sure my loved ones are safe especially from themselves so that I will never have to feel like a “posthumous voyeur.”

 

Poetry is an intimate revelation, and Simon carefully peels back layers of the soul to share flashes of her world. Just the right size to breathe in a few poems at a time and contemplate. Lovingly laid out and finely written. Recommended for poetry aficionados.

 

About the Author:

R.B. Simon is a queer artist and writer of African and European-American descent. She endeavors to create poetry centered in the mosaic of identity, the experiences that make us who we are in totality. Having battled mental health issues, substance use disorder, and trauma throughout her life, she is now in recovery and studying to become an Art Therapist, supporting others on the same journey. She has been published in multiple print and online journals including The Green Light Literary Journal, Blue Literary Journal, Electric Moon, and Literary Mama. The Good Truth is her first book. Ms. Simon is currently living in Madison, WI with her partner, daughter, and four unruly little dogs. Website.

Tails and Tales cat poetry from John Manesis

                                                         

Tails & Tales
John Manesis
Poetry
August, 2020

Buy on Amazon
Paperback $12.00

About the Book
A collection of cat poems based on 50 years experience with family pets, news items, felines in movies and famous cats in literature.

My Review
Manesis creates his latest book of 75 poems from the stuff of literature, history, film, fables and children’s stories. Some are short, a single stanza, and some cross the fold. Many follow a particular rhyme pattern and all are lyrical and pithy.

The poems all feature cats either famous by history, fable, or personal experience, such as “Cleo”: My wife and I inherited another cat…” which leads one to question “inherit”? “another”? but follows the tale of pet treatment battlelines. Another riffs on a scene from The Third Man, where a calico cat helps “out” a presumed victim. Scattered throughout are quotes from the likes of Dickens, Twain, and even da Vinci.

Poetry is often so personal it makes a reader feel like a voyeur, but Tails & Tales happily converts history, present day headlines, word play, and family into a joy ride of cats through pop culture. A very fun and appreciative Author’s Note at the end helps the reader put deeper perspective about particular poems, such as Manesis’s double take on “Puss ’n Boots.” Lots of fun for poetry and cat lovers.

About the Author
John Manesis, born in Eu Claire, Wisconsin, graduated from medical school in 1962 and practiced internal medicine and diagnostic radiology until his retirement in 1996. His poetry has appeared in over 100 literary publications, including many anthologies, and he has also published a children’s story, Greenie and the Tree Frog. He and his wife Bess have two sons and two daughters.