We Welcome Linda Nemec Foster to discuss her collection Bone Country. She'll be joined in conversation by Diane DeCillis.
Please note: masks are kindly encouraged at Literati Bookstore events.
Linda Nemec Foster's collection of prose poems is a reflection of the world before COVID. All of the pieces are inspired by other parts of the world—Istanbul, Rome, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Seville—not the familiar landscape of the United States. But, the narrator is definitely not a native of these countries; they are “the other,” “the foreigner,” the American with a distinct Midwest sensibility who is trying to make sense of a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe. The world as we used to know it.
“In Bone Country, Linda Nemec Foster’s fractured and melancholic travelogue, the poems (or micro-lyric essays) serve as such luscious and destabilizing portals through which the cities of our world are passed, emerging on the other side slick with luminescence—more amazing, more sad, holy, essential, and strange. ” —Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
“In Linda Nemec Foster’s Bone Country, each keenly composed and compressed piece seems at once fragmented and yet self-contained. It’s the speed and addictive rhythm with which they reel by that transforms this collection into a visionary travelogue.” —Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern
“Bone Country shimmers with consummate artistry.” —Clare MacQueen, editor/curator of MacQueen’s Quinterly
Linda Nemec Foster has published twelve collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book) which was created with co-author Anne-Marie Oomen and artist Meridith Ridl. Her work appears in magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North American Review, Verse Daily, Paterson Literary Review, Witness, and the 2022 Best Small Fictions Anthology. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (NJ), Fish Anthology (Ireland), and the Academy of American Poets. In 2021 her poetry book, The Blue Divide, was published by New Issues Press. A new collection of prose poetry, Bone Country, is forthcoming in 2023, after being honored as a finalist in several national competitions. Recently, she was invited to read an award-winning selection from Bone Country at the West Cork Literary Festival in Ireland. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003-2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College
Diane DeCillis is the author of Strings Attached (Wayne State University Press, 2014), winner of the Michigan Notable Book Award and the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award and finalist for the Forward INDIES Award. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals.
