World Enough Writers Author: Linda L. Beeman

Part exploration of a mythic, rough-and-tumble mining town of the Old West, part fond memoir of childhood's familiar places, Linda Beeman's Wallace, Idaho is sheer poetic delight. There is a keen, observant eye at work here, and an original mixture of the journalistic, the historical, and the lyric. Wallace is one of those triggering towns that Richard Hugo loved and visited. Beeman's Wallace poems show the uncanny details, forgotten characters, the ravaged traces of Nature after mining with a sure hand and a tenderness which can only come from a native child.

-- Lorraine Healy, author of The Habit of Buenos Aires

Wallace, Idaho

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Readings

Poem from Wallace, Idaho

Coeur d’Alene

all my life growing up
in the Coeur d’Alenes
I thought I lived in a place
called heart of the owl

no French speaker     I
was downcast to learn
the real meaning
heart of an awl

bestowed by a disgruntled
French-Canadian trader who
got the short end in a transaction
with a local native

no poetry in that name
bitter at its core
but there is a ring to the syllables
tri-part music in its soul

so I forgive him the meanness
and sing core da lane
imagining my home’s avatars
silent-winged raptors