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The Lake Huron Mermaid

Poet & Writer

Linda Nemec Foster is the author of fourteen collections of poetry including The Lake Huron Mermaid, The Blue Divide, The Lake Michigan Mermaid, Talking Diamonds, Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Listen to the Landscape, and Living in the Fire Nest. Her first full-length book of prose poems, Bone Country, was published in 2023 and nominated for 20 book awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Foster was selected to be the first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2003-2005. She is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.

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“Literary magicians Linda Nemec Foster and Anne-Marie Oomen, along with gifted illustrator Meridith Ridl, have made a beautiful book of poems about deep water—the literal and the metaphorical kind. Readers of all ages will dive deep then resurface, buoyed by invaluable wisdom and knowledge. This book isn’t just wildly and satisfyingly imaginative; it is a genuine teaching text: about Lake Huron, about medical science, about sisterly love, and about the power of joining feeling with knowing.”

Alison Swan, author of A Fine Canopy (Wayne State University Press) and Fresh Water

The Lake Huron Mermaid

“In Bone Country, Linda Nemec Foster’s fractured and melancholic travelogue, the poems (or micro-lyric essays) serve as such luscious and destabilizing portals through which the cities of our world are passed, emerging on the other side slick with luminescence—more amazing…more sad, holy, [and] essential…”

Matthew Gavin Frank
Bone Country

“I love the restlessness…the urgency of the poems in The Blue Divide, and their deep seriousness—how they peer into the present through layers of history, and peer into history through the lens of the personal; how they’re on intimate terms with both public and private violence—and can we tell the difference, after all? Tender, brutal, unflinching, magical—these poems [are] infused with the holiness of the real and the mystery of transcendence: ‘face becoming blossom becoming starburst becoming sea.’”

Cecilia Woloch
The Blue Divide

“When a young girl who fears she is losing everything stands along the shore of Lake Michigan she senses a presence hidden beneath the waves. As her grandmother did before her, she has faith in her intuitions, and in a moment of despair is met by a mysterious healing power. This lovely series of poems, beautifully illustrated in quiet watercolors, tells a tale of grief and longing healed by grace.”

Patricia Hooper
The Lake Michigan Mermaid

“In The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte, Linda Nemec Foster wonderfully illuminates that most potent of parental fears: the instant when a child slips the frame of care and is wholly gone. What’s left is the empty frame, and a sequence of moments to be filled. How perfect, then, are the paintings of Magritte to ground/un-ground this hyperattentive sequence, both representational and surreal, where a cloud “resembles/a piranha covered with gold dust” or a “serial killer,” where memory collides with dream and artifice and negation. In every poem, the daughter is not there. But in every harrowing line is a mother’s and poet’s precise, lyric devotion.”

Dennis Hinrichsen
The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte

“A humanist at heart, Linda Nemec Foster has demanded from her poetry an artfulness that engages ordinary life. With each new book her work has continued to mature, deepen, console, surprise, and Talking Diamonds is as wise as it is lovely.”

Stuart Dybek
Talking Diamonds

“The first lines in Linda Nemec Foster’s Ten Songs from Bulgaria, sing ‘Small lives, small lives/ we are trapped inside/ small lives.’ The paradox here is that Foster’s poems reveal how large and rich the worlds are in which these small lives are lived. In line after line, we encounter the depths and reach of those who live outside the zones of everyday safety. Foster makes herself vulnerable to a world ‘as tangible as fog’ with her own penetrating observations. She walks ‘the long journey’ and her poems reflect the haunting music of ode and elegy.”

Jack Ridl
Ten Songs From Bulgaria

“A poet whose words are like the haunting melodies made by a reed pipe, Linda Nemec Foster writes the lyrics to Dianne Carroll Burdick’s visual compositions. Listen to the Landscape is a book that illustrates in word and image Robert Frost’s definition of a poem as ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’”

Judith Ortiz Cofer
Listen to the Landscape

“Place and people, language, history, habitat and blood: the free range of Linda Nemec Foster’s richly textured witness is a gift—these poems, jewels.”

Thomas Lynch
Amber Necklace from Gdansk

“A beautiful, beautiful book. A stunning gem of poetry, art, and book design.”

Faye Kicknosway
Contemplating the Heavens

“Living in the Fire Nest is a free-wheeling, spirited, globe-and body-trotting collection of stunning poems. From “Old Lover” to “History of the Breasts” and beyond, Linda Nemec Foster lays down some mean, clean, touching licks—she and her book sparkle and fly.”

Gary Gildner
Living in the Fire Nest

view selected works

“As I plunge down to the depths…
…as I rise to the
lake’s glittering and jeweled surface…
every movement reflects a dance.”

from the poem, “Morning on the Lake,” (published in the book, The Lake Huron Mermaid, Wayne State University Press, 2024)

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“…the voice of my grandmother…telling me that I was in my bone country…
where only my heart would know the map.”

from the prose poem, “Bone Country”

read about this collection
“Stars as necklace
bird as witness
glass as vapor
all embraced
from the beginning.”

from the poem, “Six Days: A Creation Myth”

read about this collection
“…where the sun braids the hair of comets
where the moon learns to write its name
where everything begins and nothing ends”

from the poem, “Trinity”

read about this collection
“…We glow because we came from the same burnt-out dream
of second-generation immigrants and learned to smile
at the closed mouth of loss and dance, dance, dance.”

from the poem, “Dancing with My Sister”

read about this collection
“To walk like the scarves
Of clouds, to abandon land
And never return”

from the poem, “The Dream of Trees”

read about this collection
“…The galaxy complete
within us. But what if the night
sky is only a drape of black velvet?
The stars only holes in the fabric,
ready to tear at the seam?”

from the poem, “Stars”

read about this collection
“…I can hear you laughing in your house
the foundations shaking and you
wrapped in animal skins wanting her
closer, your breath in her mouth
closer.”

from the poem, “The Peasant Woman Tells How Baba Yaga Took Her Grandmother”

read about this collection

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

“As I plunge down to the depths…
…as I rise to the
lake’s glittering and jeweled surface…
every movement reflects a dance.”

from the poem, “Morning on the Lake,” (published in the book, The Lake Huron Mermaid, Wayne State University Press, 2024)

read about this collection
“…the voice of my grandmother…telling me that I was in my bone country…
where only my heart would know the map.”

from the prose poem, “Bone Country”

read about this collection
“Stars as necklace
bird as witness
glass as vapor
all embraced
from the beginning.”

from the poem, “Six Days: A Creation Myth”

read about this collection
“…where the sun braids the hair of comets
where the moon learns to write its name
where everything begins and nothing ends”

from the poem, “Trinity”

read about this collection
“…We glow because we came from the same burnt-out dream
of second-generation immigrants and learned to smile
at the closed mouth of loss and dance, dance, dance.”

from the poem, “Dancing with My Sister”

read about this collection
“To walk like the scarves
Of clouds, to abandon land
And never return”

from the poem, “The Dream of Trees”

read about this collection
“…The galaxy complete
within us. But what if the night
sky is only a drape of black velvet?
The stars only holes in the fabric,
ready to tear at the seam?”

from the poem, “Stars”

read about this collection
“…I can hear you laughing in your house
the foundations shaking and you
wrapped in animal skins wanting her
closer, your breath in her mouth
closer.”

from the poem, “The Peasant Woman Tells How Baba Yaga Took Her Grandmother”

read about this collection

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Events & Readings

Linda Nemec Foster is pleased to connect with the community through readings, workshops, and discussions. Please join her at one of the upcoming events.