Kari Wergeland’s Wannabe Blue is a compelling and philosophical poetry collection characterized by close observation ‘The little shark has kitten teeth, / black button eye. / Its mouth hinged open’, wariness ‘Danger could open up anywhere / Just this thought wrings a drop of awe from the morning’, and yearning for something beyond all the anxieties we face ‘I want the world to be / about love and creativity— / colorful trinkets by the sea’. These are poems to visit again and again to find the place inside us where solace begins.

— Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place,
                                editor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California

The poems in Wannabe Blue describe Kari Wergeland’s wide-ranging recollections with well-honed poetic craftsmanship. There is a fine mix of free verse lyrics and occasional pieces of formal poetry as in the lovely sonnet titled "Old Photos". The poet has an ability to compress stories from various time periods into a single poem, handling with ease and an adept use of language, the move from a present time glimpse of a coyote to past memories of a father who smoked when she was in elementary school. Conversations during two different visits to the beach, appear to be in stark contrast only to the poet herself, whose loss of her hair between those visits makes an understated, but moving, reference to her cancer. This collection gives occasional glimpses of California, seen as the vivid color of bougainvillea, brilliant against the green grays of the Pacific Northwest. Underlying these places, layers of history break through in the form of miners’ panning for gold and old ghost towns crumbling into the present time and into the poet’s imagination. Interspersed among the histories are moments of whimsy that will make you smile, like the grapevines whose trunks twine together ‘as if preparing to dance’, or the dry leaves that fell ‘up into the air’, on ‘the day the waves broke backwards.’

— Judith Barrington, author of The Conversation, Long Love: New & Selected Poems, 1985-2017 and
                                               Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, 2024