Traveling Detours and U-Turns

TRAVELING DETOURS AND U‑TURNS is the final, resonant offering from acclaimed Vancouver poet d. n. simmers, whose work has long been praised for its Whitman‑like embrace of the everyday and its Beat‑infused search for the light hidden inside ordinary lives. In this collection, simmers turns his keen eye toward the unpredictable pathways that shape a human journey-those sudden shifts, stalled moments, and unexpected returns that reveal who we are when the map falls away.These poems move with the restless energy of a traveler who understands that meaning is rarely found in the straight line. Simmers writes with an earthy clarity that reaches from the street corner to the spiritual threshold, capturing the grit of lived experience alongside the shimmer of the unseen. His voice is grounded, compassionate, and unafraid to look directly at the world’s contradictions: joy and sorrow, memory and forgetting, the intimate and the immense. Each poem becomes a small turning, a recalibration, a reminder that the road itself is the teacher.Drawing on a lifetime of writing and community involvement, simmers brings forward the same qualities that defined his earlier work-precision, accessibility, and emotional honesty. His poems have appeared in The Capilano Review, SubTerrain, and numerous international anthologies. He served as Vice President of the White Rock and Surrey Writers Club, contributed as an online special editor with Fine Lines, and judged contests for publications in California and New Hampshire. His book Food Truck Elements of Shadowed Lights won 3rd Prize in the 2019 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, and his subsequent titles, The Red School Bus and Walking Across the Day, further established him as a distinctive and generous voice in Canadian poetry.TRAVELING DETOURS AND U‑TURNS gathers the wisdom of a life spent observing, listening, and transforming the overlooked into the luminous. It is a book of movement and stillness, of departures and returns, of the fragile and the eternal. In these pages, simmers offers readers a final journey-one marked by clarity, humility, and the quiet radiance of a poet who understood that every detour contains its own destination. 6