“In ‘Vision,’ one of many arresting poems in Talking Diamonds, Linda Nemec Foster’s protagonist sees Our Lady of Guadalupe in an unlikely Hawaiian setting. Half-waking from reverie, she recognizes that the Virgin is in fact tattooed, front and back, on a native man: ‘And you tell yourself this isn’t a miracle,’ she writes, ‘only a tattoo; this isn’t anything/extraordinary, only your life…’ But that is precisely what makes her new collection so compelling: from what Wordsworth called the simple produce of the common day—a child’s piano recital, a family photograph, a wretched piece of motel art—Foster exacts an energy that is, precisely, visionary, even miraculous. This is an effort so widespread in contemporary poetry as itself to seem a commonplace, and one that generally fails. Not so in Talking Diamonds, which challenges, intrigues, awes, and ultimately gratifies, poem after excellent poem.”

Sydney Lea