Linda Nemec Foster

Poetry. "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.

"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...
and her poems reflect the haunting music of ode and elegy." Jack Ridl

Inspired by Foster's first trip to Poland in 1996 and her Polish-American heritage, Amber Necklace from Gdansk explores Polish immigrants' experiences with assimilation in the US, those immigrants' children's attitudes toward their ethnicity, and how these attitudes have been colored by America's typically disinterested view toward Eastern Europe- the other Europe that only recently began to emerge from history's shadow.

Mirroring the human response to the natural world, this book is a rare synthesis of stunning landscape photography and understated haiku poetry.

Linda Nemec Foster writes friom a place of deep passion - vivid, vital, alive to the sizzle of the story and need. Her sounds and images crackle and explode. If these rich "History of the Body" prose poems don't ignite you, nothing will! -Naomi Shihab Nye