“Women learning to sing again after a war. Immigrants learning a new world and language while trying not to forget the old. The Seven Deadly Sins as fashion statements. A train ride into the afterlife. A woman putting on red lipstick in a colorless city. Mary Magdalene eyed through a modern lens. A daughter calling her dead father in a dream. In The Blue Divide, Linda Nemec Foster navigates the edges and depths of worlds both here and beyond—through currents of art, love, war, dreams, religion, history, language, family—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, author of The Seed Thieves, American Prophet, Our Sudden Museum, and Severance
“Linda Nemec Foster’s poems flex their powerful muscles in this dynamic new collection. With clarity and intensity, she 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. I am always interested in whatever she has to say; she is always paying attention, pointing out the places where the heart breaks, and where it mends.”
— Jim Daniels