"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."

Lorranine Healy, author of The Habit of Buenos Aires

"This collection of lyric poems animates the town's history and underscores the place with a keen sense of linguistic music.  The poems focus on the place, historical events and characters.  A reader can feel the personal witnessing of history here, and it's really powerful."

Francis McCue

Linda Beeman is an award-winning non-fiction writer and poet living on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. She is the author of 'Wallace, Idaho' and 'Collateral Damage' -- tributes to her hometown and to those scarred by the Afghan War.

Her most recent chapbook, 'Our Whidbey Year' praises notable annual events -- March peeper chorusing, yellowing Scotch broom, return of the whales in Saratoga Passage -- that bind people to Whidbey Island. "I'm an erratic here myself," she says, "discovering constellations in iced potholes and foxgloves' sinister side."

Accumulation of Days

"We age, we bemoan 
slippery memory 
broken sleep 
chronic pain

We reach for grace 
iced forsythia on a February morning 
the shape of an owl’s wing in slow flight 
wood smoke smells in old textiles 
acceptance that what’s undone will wait

Accumulated insights layer one upon another 
knowledge sifted through humility 
justice measured with compassion 
beauty sculpted by imperfection 
love honed with patience 
hope balancing wisdom

Our voyages out 
eventually bring us home 
where we acknowledge 
the unknowns we sought 
were coded

deep within us
all along"

www.secondjourney.org