For almost thirty years, Linda M. Hasselstrom has educated others about the practical, communal, historical, and spiritual dimensions of ranch life on the Plains of South Dakota. Going at this task with extraordinary energy, she has taken on a multiplicity of roles: first as teacher, editor, and publisher, and later as poet, essayist, and historian. Hasselstrom's role as a woman rancher, however, has been the bedrock of her writing. Her favorite review, as she reveals in "On Writing Western" (December 1996), includes this line about herself: "She can deliver a calf and a poem on the same day--after mending a fence." Between 1979 and 2000, Hasselstrom published ten books of her own poetry and nonfiction, and her writings appeared in more than seventy magazines and in several anthologies. Insisting on the importance of local culture and local literature, she records the texture of living and working on a family-run cattle ranch...