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Tracing Lines
To write a poem is to trace along the ragged edges of a memory and say, “This is what I experienced.” It is to trace the sweeping flight of a swallow over a river at sunset and say to the world, “This is beautiful.” It is to trace a line through the thick dust and say to yourself, very softly, “I am alive.”
Tracing Lines is a compilation of poems drawn from the life and experiences of an individual learning to live, both at home and in a cross-cultural setting. With themes ranging from nature to prayer to humor, this book is meant to be read slowly and meditatively, with each bit savored. As you read, may you be blessed and able to trace the lines running so beautifully through your own life.
Contains 87 poems and 10 illustrations
Tracing Lines is a compilation of poems drawn from the life and experiences of an individual learning to live, both at home and in a cross-cultural setting. With themes ranging from nature to prayer to humor, this book is meant to be read slowly and meditatively, with each bit savored. As you read, may you be blessed and able to trace the lines running so beautifully through your own life.
Contains 87 poems and 10 illustrations
- GenresPoetry
135 pages, Paperback
Published March 10, 2026
About the author
Lori Hershberger
2 books28 followersLori Hershberger remembers writing her first poem in the 5th grade, and it was pretty awful, but since then, she has improved quite a bit. Born and raised in Kansas, she moved to Thailand in 2014. Years later, she still calls Thailand home. Lori teaches English to high school students in the town of Mae Sariang in Mae Hong Son Province, and while she loves her adopted country and people, she also aches at times with missing her other home in Kansas. Lori has a BA in English Communication from Payap University International College in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and also completed Moreland University's graduate level Teach-Now program. Lori dreams of traveling to many places across the world, but also loves staying at home with a book, a cat, and a cup of coffee. She loves poetry and good fantasy as well as many other genres. She would love to hear from you!
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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June 18, 2026A note from the author: When I first published Tracing Lines, and it made its entrance on Goodreads, I put it on my bookshelf as “reading” to give it a gentle push out into the world of Goodreads. Now, it’s on my bookshelf and it feels strange to mark it as “read” since I am the author and of course I have read it, but I don’t want it to sit there forever like a ghost in limbo that can’t move on to heaven. I also feel strange rating it, so I won’t, but I do want to give you as a reader a blessing as you read it: May the words in this book be like the ravens that fed Elijah, meeting you where you are, and providing sustenance for whatever journey you are on. May you be delighted, may you be comforted, may you be moved.
June 9, 2026
A lovely book of poetry. Graceful lines that touch on whimsical moments, scenes from Southeast Asia, Kansas memories, spiritual longings, meditations on Jesus, grief, and humorous stories.
I came to the last poem, “Nativity,” and realized I had read it somewhere before. Once again, I was struck by its combination of hilarity and profundity. It’s funny, it’s beautiful, and the last line brings tears to my eyes!
Excerpts from other poems:
But even though you know
that there is going to be a sickle moon,
you are still surprised when there it is,
suddenly,
in its corner, looking down at you
and saying,
hi.
The moon doesn’t say much, you know.
And all the rest of the night
you remember that minute you saw the moon
hanging in the sunset sky,
saying hi.
___
We did not even see Him:
the stranger on the edge, pushed into the margins,
the refugee crushed by the heavy foot of power,
the neglected child starving on the street because of our agendas.
We did not even see Him.
And even now, scheming beneath the crosses of the dying,
we roll the dice to take their clothes,
and nail our homeless Kings against a riven sky.
I came to the last poem, “Nativity,” and realized I had read it somewhere before. Once again, I was struck by its combination of hilarity and profundity. It’s funny, it’s beautiful, and the last line brings tears to my eyes!
Excerpts from other poems:
But even though you know
that there is going to be a sickle moon,
you are still surprised when there it is,
suddenly,
in its corner, looking down at you
and saying,
hi.
The moon doesn’t say much, you know.
And all the rest of the night
you remember that minute you saw the moon
hanging in the sunset sky,
saying hi.
___
We did not even see Him:
the stranger on the edge, pushed into the margins,
the refugee crushed by the heavy foot of power,
the neglected child starving on the street because of our agendas.
We did not even see Him.
And even now, scheming beneath the crosses of the dying,
we roll the dice to take their clothes,
and nail our homeless Kings against a riven sky.
June 17, 2026
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.
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.
June 23, 2026
If you have met Lori, you know her words are true echoes of a life being well-lived. But even deeper than that, Lori has a beautiful gift of being connected to and verbalizing the haunting beauty and longing that is life. Her poetry reflects that sentiment and 'Tracing Lines' overflows with the personal and diverse experience of life we all can relate to.
June 16, 2026
These poems are filled with talent, beauty, and emotional weight. Somehow the words invite one to feel alive.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews