Rural Score

<p><em>Rural Score</em> is a first collection of poems by Minnesota writer Lina Belar.  This is a writer who loves the places and the people she writes about. With <em>Free Ticket</em> there is a strong emotional punch right at the beginning a sense of loss and grief that comes back in <em>At the Cafe During WeFest</em>. There are poems that hearken back to childhood and ground us. We are invited into the writer's world traveling the back roads of northern Minnesota listening to church bells in a rural town and watching seagulls follow the plow seemingly ordinary events with revealing angles exposed by the poet's eye. In the juxtaposition between<em> Tornado</em> and <em>One Perfect Summer Evening</em> Belar suggests how art and community can help us get past devastation.  Beginning to end page by page <em>Rural Score</em> reveals a poet who writes because she loves this place.       </p>