Overview

"The poetry of Doug Linder is characterized by plain speech, empathy, wit, and a penchant for taking readers to surprising places. The Idea of North brings together more than fifty poems set in the North Country (""Is it a place or is it an idea?""). Linder's poetic imaginings wander the North from the polar-bear-prowled streets of Churchill to hot springs under Montana's big sky, but he returns most often to the place he knows best, Minnesota's distinctive ""North Shore,"" the wild lands north of Lake Superior. Many of these playful poems consider wildlife (you'll find poems about lynx, moose, wolves and woodpeckers) and the natural world (lichens, dragonflies, northern lights), but the collection also includes poems about such diverse subjects as curling, maple syrup, taconite plants, second homes, and a gas station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Deftly mixing deep insights and play, this is a poetry book even for people who thought they didn't like poetry."

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9781662925665

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Doug Linder has a most definite idea about the North, especially the area Midwesterners refer to as The North Shore. It's an idea that comes from years of roaming the shores of Lake Superior, getting to know its people, towns, wildlife, and traditions-an idea rooted in sheer love for a place out In the Middle of Nowhere. What is the best way to preserve something amazing and beautiful? What is the best way to share it? Linder finds making poetry suitable for both; in one of his spot of time poems, he tells his twenty-three-year-old self to memorize a meeting with a lone wolf: Remember his amber eyes, / and his leisurely lope across the snow-covered tundra. Forty years later, he remembers how the moment pierced him, setting [him] on fire. Such transfers of experience fill the collection as the narrator looks for ways to pass his sense of place down to the next generation (and the next). We want them to love what we love, he admits, and happily for us, the poems in The Idea of North bring us a long way there. -- Joyce Sutphen, poet laureate of Minnesota (2011-2021) and author of Carrying Water to the Field and This Long Winter

Author Information

"Doug Linder is a native Minnesotan who splits time between Kansas, where he teaches law, and Lutsen, Minnesota, where he and his wife Cheryl have, for decades, spent their summers. Author of two popular books on legal professionalism, a lecturer on historic trials and civil liberties issues in the ""Great Courses"" series, and creator of the Web's largest and most visited website on famous trials, Linder has long kept his poetry from public view-until recently, when his poems began receiving attention in places ranging from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac to Scientific American. He loves to hike, travel, read, canoe, curl, and take regular dips into the energizing waters of Lake Superior."

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