Poems by Moheb Soliman can be found at Great Lakes-area parks this summer/NPS

If you’re at a Great Lakes park this summer, you might read poetry on signs where you expect to find information. Nature poems masquerading as official park signs can be found throughout Apostle Islands, Pictured Rocks, and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshores, as well as Isle Royale National Park at trails, vistas, and beaches as part of the National Park Service’s centennial celebration.

“Classic brown and white metal park signs complete with official symbols will pose poetic insights about Great Lakes nature, culture, modernity, and identity, in contrast to their normal didactic and regulatory information,” the Park Service said in a release.

The texts were written by poet Moheb Soliman and designed in collaboration with park staff. They collaborated on each location, as the signs speak to special types of places and experiences such as beaches, hiking, or technology. Park visitors can see the signs as they tour major destination spots or pick up a pamphlet at visitor centers listing the five spots where they are located.

Mr. Soliman is an accomplished poet and artist from Egypt and the Midwest with more than 15 years of experience presenting work in U.S. and Canadian cities in diverse contexts. His poetry has led to text-based performance and installation work, commissions for public poetry projects and festivals, residency awards at institutions such as the Banff Centre and Vermont Studio Center. Recent fellowships from the Joyce Foundation and Pillsbury House spurred his interdisciplinary project H.O.M.E.S., about nature, culture, modernity, belonging, and identity around the Great Lakes region.

“The concept behind this project draws inspiration from poetry as a powerful and flexible art form, but also from installation and performance art, which offers unexpected aesthetic and creative experiences and encounters in the everyday world,” the Park Service said. “Park visitors expect signs from the administration to be straight-forward, scientific, ecological, and/or historical. Putting poetic content in place of that is a surprising and engaging reversal of their assumptions about what it means to engage with nature in parks with others, how officialdom and administrators could ‘see and feel’ nature with us, and how contemporary poetry and art continue to experiment with addressing the natural world in our time.”