Blue Divide – Poems

Linda Nemec Foster is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Amber Necklace from Gdansk and Talking Diamonds. She is also the coauthor of The Lake Michigan Mermaid with Anne-Marie Oomen. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and journals, including the Georgia Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, Witness, New American Writing, North American Review, and Verse Daily. From 2003 to 2005, she served as the first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.

• I.Love in the Midst of War 5The Cypress Trees in Croatia 6Report from Bosnia: “Hair” Performed in Sarajevo 7The American Insomniac Buys Lipstick in Warsaw, 1950 9Poland 11Fire and Ice 12Café de Paris: Geneva, Switzerland 13Pictures of the Floating World: New York City, June, 2001 14NYC to Poughkeepsie: The Man on the Train 15The Dead 16Inside the Crater 17Transplant 18Six Days: A Creation Myth 19Scar 20Trying to Get It Right 21Sequence: The Artist’s Notebook 22The Dream of Maine 25Milan, Ohio 26Fashion Accessories for the Seven Deadly Sins 27II.Fog Made of Iron 33Anonymous Afternoon 34The Far Country 35Mount Fuji 36All That We Cannot Name 37The Atheist 38Waiting for the Annunciation 39The Modern Woman Imagines the Life of Mary Magdalene 40Life Cycle of Clouds 44III. The Immigrants in Slavic Village: Cleveland, 1955 49Family Tree 50Drawing: In the Evening, 1991 52The Theory of Everything 53Blue 55The Water 56Gravity and God 57A Kiss Is Just a Kiss 58At 68, My Mother Sees Her First Foreign Film 59Thirst 60In the Midst of Dreams 61The Muted Breath of Early Spring 63On the First Anniversary of His Death, I Dream of My Father 65The Dream That Is Forgotten 66

“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.”