Rural Score by Lina Belar

“There are still more worlds left to travel,” Lina Belar tells us. In Rural Score, we find a catalogue of small town history and experience preserved that may convince us those worlds are not so far away, after all.

–Sarah Sadie, author of We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds

Lina Belar’s work moves through mostly rural places and seasons with eyes “hungry for color,” “observing, cataloguing, admiring / Maybe loving,” from the lives of shy girls and an unbridled passion for the books she reads as a child to hollyhocks standing guard at abandoned gas stations and poplar leaves in autumn “like anxious debutantes / trying on dresses / for the Harvest Ball.” More often than not, these poems are indeed acts of loving.

–Mark Vinz, author of Permanent Record

“Lina Belar writes poems of bracing elegance. With a musician’s gift for sound in language, she approaches seemingly simple truths at revealing angles. Then, her closing lines give you the most satisfying kind of whiplash.”

–Elisa Korenne, songwriter and author of Hundred Miles to Nowhere: An Unlikely Love Story (North Star Press 2017)

In “Rural Score” Lina Belar presents poetry at its best. No need for the reader to decipher hidden meanings or symbols. Ms Belar’s work is crafted with word images assembled to touch each of us in our spaces of memory and desire.

–Sonja Kosler