“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