Wandering Verse

Crafted on the Marquette Iron Range in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the challenges of the Great Depression, Elsie Nelson’s Wandering Verse captures the daily life of a woman, wife, and mother of the 1930s. Completely immersed in the demands of raising eight children while living in the wilderness, Nelson recorded and cataloged her life with pencil stubs and scraps of paper.
What emerged from such simple tools was a collection of art that was as measured and true as her love for meter and rhyme. Though she never knew that the poems she wrote would be seen outside of her family, this collection of verse, written exclusively by her over a period of 60 years and collected by her children, provides a significant degree of naturalism, humanity, and time-honored truths.