The evocative prose poems in Bone Country, Linda Nemec Foster’s thirteenth collection, shimmer with consummate artistry. Representing “an American voice” in other parts of the world, these lyrical pieces were written several years before the pandemic, when the poet and her husband were traveling—by air, by rail, by two-lane highway—to dozens of destinations in western and central Europe.

Foster reflects along the way, with grace and deep insight, upon a variety of themes: art and music, architecture and sculpture, death and loss, landscape and history...

The large peonies bursting with fists of pink and red taste like pure heaven to the ants who ravish the blossoms in my grandmother’s garden: in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains, their scent is as strong as memory, her empty arms, a closed door [“Postcards”].

...love and war, faith and doubt, and the sacred and the profane—from The Infant Jesus of Prague enshrined in a Carmelite church, to Dijon mustard in a toothpaste tube.

The work of a virtuoso, Bone Country is a veritable treasury of gorgeous writing, consistently compelling and a must-read, especially for connoisseurs of the prose poem.

For more details, including Accolades and additional reviews, please see About Bone Country at the author’s website. Issue 15 of MacQueen’s Quinterly includes this pair of prose poems from the book: Hel as a Destination My Husband Disguised as a Stranger in a Krakow Bar

Cornerstone Press March 2023 112 pages

Clare MacQueen

is founding editor, curator, and publisher of MacQueen’s Quinterly online, which launched on New Year’s Day 2020; and its predecessor literary and arts journal, KYSO Flash, with 12 online issues from 2014 through 2019, plus six annual print anthologies.

She also served as webmaster and associate editor for Serving House Journal from its inception in January 2010 through its retirement in May 2018, after publishing 18 issues. She is among the co-editors of Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life (Serving House Books, 2015), and the editor, designer, and publisher of 20 books for her KYSO Flash micro-press (retired since March 2020).

Ms. MacQueen was honored to serve as one of two judges for the 2017 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, and one of three finalist judges for the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize in 2021 (Contest Results at Cultural Daily).

For several years, she’s been a member of the Senior General Advisory Board for The Best Small Fictions, an annual anthology now published by Alternating Current Press (2023). Previous issues were published by Sonder Press (2019-2022) and by Braddock Avenue Books (2017-2018). For the 2016 edition, published by Queen’s Ferry Press, Ms. MacQueen served as Assistant Editor, Domestic.

Her occasional reviews appear in KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Serving House Journal; her short fiction, essays, and poetry have been published in Firstdraft, Bricolage, New Flash Fiction Review, Serving House Journal, and Skylark, among others; and her essays, anthologized in Best New Writing 2007 and Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging (Serving House Books, 2012).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ “No Succinct Summary Will Do Them Justice” by Clare MacQueen, reviewing A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries From 80 American Poets on Their Prose Poetry (edited by Peter Johnson); here in MacQ (Issue 2, March 2020)

(Although her review is 99% positive, MacQueen points out that the book seems to under-represent women prose poets. And she names four additional women whose works she believes also belong in a definitive collection like this one: Jane Hirshfield, Linda Nemec Foster, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, and Lorette C. Luzajic.)

⚡ The Fortune You Seek Lies in a Different Cookie by Clare MacQueen in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Tasting the New, a favorite small fiction from MacQueen’s writings, in Serving House Journal (Issue 1, Spring 2010)