World Sideways: Poems

What remains after the years pass?

A mother singing hymns in a farmhouse kitchen. A father teaching life lessons beneath a car. A wife descending the stairs before dawn. Cornfields shrouded in fog. A forgotten conversation. A child's misunderstanding. The quiet rituals that become a life.

In The World Sideways, Scott Hertzog explores the moments that often go unnoticed-the ordinary encounters that leave lasting imprints on who we become. Drawing from rural Pennsylvania, family history, faith, marriage, travel, humor, and loss, these poems transform familiar landscapes into places of discovery.

Moving between memory and reflection, childhood and adulthood, certainty and doubt, Hertzog's poems examine the people, places, and experiences that shape a life. A mother's unexpected rebuke, a father's hard-earned wisdom, the tenderness of a lasting marriage, the complexities of faith, and the changing landscapes of home all find expression in poems that are by turns nostalgic, questioning, humorous, and hopeful.

Rooted in the fields, farms, and small communities of Lancaster County yet reaching toward universal human experiences, The World Sideways invites readers to slow down, look closer, and discover the extraordinary hidden within the familiar. These poems remind us that life's deepest truths are often found not in grand events, but in the traces they leave behind.

Both intimate and expansive, The World Sideways is a collection about memory, love, family, place, and the enduring marks we leave on one another as we move through the world.