Poems & Essays by George N Wallace

Brimming with life and hands-on work, Fencelines is Wolverine Farm’s second release from George Wallace, a nationally-recognized conservationist, professor, and poet. Ruminating on the dramatic landscape and cultural changes he has witnessed during a full life on Colorado’s Northern Front Range, Fencelines sings and shouts about the beauty, desecration, and redemptive powers of nature and working shoulder to shoulder with others. With his farm and ranch of 54 years as a base, his muse seems to appear while baling hay, fixing fence, working with livestock, watching the sky or dancing.

“George Wallace uses humor and poetry to bridge the urban/rural divide-- as he uses his imagination to visit a plane flying overhead, fill it with folks like a developer, a Brazilian bull rider, and a blue-haired lady on her way to play the slots. Join George as he reminds us, "Even good hay is never perfect." He finds a bonus in a Meadow Vole. He shows us images of lovely things no longer there but memorialized in the names of subdivision streets--something that's happening in many parts of the once-rural West. All this and much more in Fencelines.”

—Linda Hasselstrom, poet, writer, 2020 South Dakota Poet of Merit

“In this witty, Whitman-esque celebration of life on his northern Colorado back 40 (or maybe it’s 400), George Wallace writes with dirt on his hands and generous ideas in his head. He spins vivid stories inside poems and essays, invites you into “the fellowship . . . of those who still have their hands on the cow.” He asks you to join him, his family and crew in cutting and baling hay through the night, a haunted yet peaceful ritual, under the dome of heaven, with coyotes and other animals looking on at the edges of a clanking machine’s headlights. About his cow dog, he says “the morning news flows in through his nose.” Lucky reader, this book will flow through your soul.”

—John Calderazzo, CSU Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus

“George Wallace in Fencelines conveys his love of a changing way of life with close observation of details and a deep affection for the west. A work of prose poetry and prose, this book explores sympathies/antipathies, the oppositions we all encounter in life, and presents a convincing portrait of ranch life today and yesterday, celebrating what’s past and passing. It provides a critique of the new as that new challenges a fading way of life and in these poems and essays we can glimpse the lives of cowboys and ranch hands as they go about the nearly invisible work so essential to us all.”

—Mary Crow, former Poet Laureate of Colorado