This Town, published in 1961, contains 60 poems divided into three sections: 
This Town, This Trap, and This Truth.

As Eliana Beam’s five children grew, she had numerous occasions to interact with other parents through the Parent Teacher Association, scouts meetings, community fund-raiser pot luck dinners, and even the pottery class in which she enrolled.  When her youngest entered kindergarten, with the desire to write burning ever stronger in Eliana, she landed a job as the editor of the Strongsville Sentinel, a community newspaper.   During the same time, her husband "Jimmy" ran for School Board and was elected. . . . a position in which he served for 18 years, until their "baby" graduated from high school and he retired from the bank.

These roles as mother, wife, and newspaper editor provided the grist for Eliana's early poems about a young mother’s ragged nerves, her children's triumphs and tears, marriage, town gossip, neighbors, nature, and taxes.   When the dishes were done each evening and the kids settled in front of Zorro or a good Alfred Hitchcock thriller, Eliana would settle down to write with Roget's Thesaurus, her Rhyming Dictionary, Bartlett's Quotations, and reams of paper piled in her lap.

Out of print

Sample poems from This Town:

• Lament of the Craftsman’s Wife, published in Better Homes & Gardens, May 1952
• That’s Cats, published in Cats Magazine
• This Town
• Music in the Tender Trap