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by Stan Winarski (Author)
These forty acres in Wisconsin's Blue Hills have been Stan Winarski's classroom, chapel, and compass for fifty years. In The Woods Trails & Tangents, selected from over 350 entries in the 2025 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition, thirty poems follow those trails and the tangents the mind takes when the body finally goes quiet.
A chipmunk and a poet frozen in a standoff at dusk, cold so alive it hunts like a predator, two glacier-dropped boulders that will outlast us all. Rhymed stanzas sit alongside haiku, free verse beside tight syllabics, a mosquito-plagued trail romp beside a five-line elegy for summer. The woods insist on variety.
Crows appear throughout, dreaming, questioning, and bearing witness, as frequent a presence in these poems as they are in the woods themselves.
"Shared Secret" shrinks the world to a drop of water in a dried vernal pool and asks what one man's footprint really costs. "Mortality & Blueberries" holds that question lightly, with humor intact. "November Farewell" finds Kaddish in bare poplars swaying in the wind.
The closing poem, "Pressed Leaf," offers the only manifesto these poems need: seek the small and still, trust the concrete image, let truth in the moment be enough.
Poems previously published in Solitary Plover, Bramble, The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Calendar, and broadcast on WDRT FM's The Landward Series.
