Wallace, Idaho

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.