“In poem after brilliant poem, Linda Nemec Foster presents us with the balancing acts people perform as they move between their ordinary lives and the secret lives they imagine. A housewife burns the dinner she is cooking while she imagines herself as a glamorous character in the movie she is watching. A man scanning the tabloid headlines at the supermarket checkout is overwhelmed by his insignificance. A mother dreams herself as a sparrow outside her daughter’s window. Even in her most autobiographical poems, Foster finds the strangeness that gives meaning to everyday events, her imagination being as boundless as her sympathy. Her inventiveness culminates in the book’s final section, “A History of the Body,” a tour de force consisting of twenty-four exuberant, origin legends.”

Lisel Mueller