Rural Score

Rural Score 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 Free Ticket, there is a strong emotional punch right at the beginning, a sense of loss and grief, that comes back in At the Cafe During WeFest. 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 Tornado and One Perfect Summer Evening, Belar suggests how art and community can help us get past devastation. Beginning to end, page by page, Rural Score reveals a poet who writes because she loves this place.