Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles

Laurie Wagner Buyer

Spring's Edge reflects life during one season on the modern-day Colorado cattle ranch Laurie Buyer once called home. Her diary recounts the day-to-day toil and the challenge of trying to find time to write while continuing to help with outdoor chores, cooking, cleaning, balancing the books, and working for a neighboring ranch.

Chronicling a time of deep personal change, Buyer struggles with her role as a ranch wife, faces the diminishing vitality of an agricultural way of life, and nurses her father through a terminal illness. Buyer tries to bridge the gap between the rural world she cherishes and the inevitable encroachment of urban sprawl. Meanwhile, her writing of landscape and weather, livestock and wildlife, loneliness and intimacy capture the innate rhythms of relationships, the resilience of love, and the astonishing beauty of life on the land.

"Buyer is a rare talent, and her poetic heart shows in this brilliant piece of lyrical prose. Her writing is frank and emotional, yet as crystalline and clean as a sunny winter day in the high country that she writes about. I can see Spring's Edge being held up a hundred years from now as a classic piece of Western American literature, and Laurie Wagner Buyer heralded as one of the important chroniclers of the times."--Roundup Magazine

"Every so often, a book comes along that is...rich and complex, that...vividly captures the essence of place, [and] that seamlessly blends the cerebral with the actual....Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicle is just such a book."--Victoria Advocate, Texas

"Future historians, especially those of Colorado ranch life at the end of the 20th century, will someday beatify Laurie Wagner Buyer....Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles is...an invaluable gift to anyone who wants to reconstruct what happened."--Durango Herald

Laurie Wagner Buyer speaks, performs, and writes about the experiences of women in the American West. Her books include Side Canyons, Open Range: Poetry of the Re-Imagined West, and Across the High Divide, winner of the 2007 Spur Award for Best Poetry. She lives in Woodland Park, Colorado.

6 x 9 229 pages 25 halftones