“Rich with closely observed detail, narrative depth, and poignant historical reflections, this is a generous and beautiful collection.”

Publishers Weekly
(Read the complete review here)

“In The Blue Divide, Linda Nemec Foster navigates the edges and depths of worlds both here and beyond…to map what flows between us. Testimonial to human endurance and love song to the human spirit, this gem of a book, retrieved from the deep by a poet at the height of her prowess, is as wide as a ‘cavalcade of blue sky’ and as deep as ‘the blue damask of morning.’ Hold these poems up to the light to see the wide blue world (and the world in you) changed, for good.”

Robert Fanning

“With clarity and intensity, Linda Nemec Foster dives deep into the shadows, and deep into the light—global landscape, personal touch; faith and art; the sensual and the cruel; forward and backward through generations of family, acknowledging loss wherever it occurs—all with her trademark tenderness and resilience.”

Jim Daniels

“Both a tourist and an inhabitant everywhere: whether in Warsaw, Cleveland, Sarajevo, New York City, Geneva, Poughkeepsie, Oahu, or Ypsilanti, Linda Nemec Foster finds the stuff of poetry and makes it real and tangible. From ‘the thin line of horizon,’ she reminds us that ‘everything/everything is connected. Whether/we can dare to believe it or not.’”

Laurel Blossom

“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