Yes, the poet, Wesley D. Sims, is a naturalist, and his poems illuminate the changes in nature’s plants and animals and ecology, but he also dips into the changes affecting humans who exist in this natural world. "A pair of common house sparrows" proclaiming "their trust in the future" to battling king snake and copperhead to man scanning across generations proclaiming memories and mortality, each poem in Taste of Change, a chapbook by Wes Sims, works like a striking documentary photograph. These poems record the change of seasons and shift of shadows, both of earth and the body. Beautiful images, dodged and burned, give us a potent and compelling contrast, record an alluring feast of struggle and sustenance.” - Darnell Arnoult. “Like the heron, Wes Sims has honed his patience, giving us with these poems about the mountains and the lakes, their birds and their people. Each poem in Taste of Change reads like a prayer, like the deepest of meditations, or like ‘secret whispers of star-struck lovers.’” - Denton Loving. Wesley D. Sims is a private person who lives in East Tennessee.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Iris Books, 2019. 47 pages. Trade paperback.