My husband buys small purple plums, places them in a light green ceramic bowl, and I think of the plum tree of my childhood in northern Ohio. For years, it greeted me every morning with its quiet stature: like a sentinel in our backyard, always protecting me. Until that one day I woke to find the tree completely covered in tiny green bugs. The entire trunk, every branch, every leaf, every small plum totally encased in a mint green velour. And, the poor plums trying to hang on in spite of the new color scheme surrounding them. As if all sense of their former life in deep amethyst was forgotten in this tidal wave of peridot. The birthstone of my only daughter who hadn’t even been imagined yet. There, in the backyard of my girlhood, where I didn’t know the future—only the past that was slowly slipping away with every morning the dead plum tree wasn’t there.

Can we really forget 

the past? That dark gem 
in our hearts 

never leaves us. Only 
changes from I was 
to I am to I will be. 

—Long-Listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #2

Linda Nemec Foster

is the author of 14 published collections of poetry, including the critically acclaimed books Amber Necklace from Gdańsk (a finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry; Louisiana State University Press, 2001), The Lake Michigan Mermaid with Anne-Marie Oomen (2019 Michigan Notable Book; Wayne State University Press, 2018), and two published by New Issues Press: Talking Diamonds (2009) and The Blue Divide (2021). In 2018, Cervena Barva Press published her book The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte.

Ms. Foster’s first full-length collection of prose poems, Bone Country (Cornerstone Press, 2023), has been nominated for 20 book awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Selections from the book have been honored in eleven competitions—including Fish Anthology’s Flash Fiction Contest in Ireland (2022) and Best Small Fictions 2022.

Her work has appeared in more than 350 magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, New American Writing, Nimrod, North American Review, Quarterly West, Paterson Literary Review, Witness, and Verse Daily. Her poems have also been published in anthologies in the U.S. and Great Britain, and translated in Europe. Collaborations with visual artists, musicians, and composers have brought her poetry to new venues and audiences; her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries, set to music, and produced for the stage.

Ms. Foster has received more than 30 nominations for the Pushcart Prize and has been honored with awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, ArtServe Michigan, the National Writer’s Voice, and the Academy of American Poets. On multiple occasions, she has been awarded prizes in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest sponsored by Paterson Literary Review; in 2023, she won first prize in the prestigious competition. In 2015, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dyer-Ives Foundation for her poetry and advocacy of the literary arts in Michigan. She is co-founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College, and was the first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (serving from 2003-2005).

Ms. Foster’s new book of poetry, The Lake Huron Mermaid, will be published by Wayne State University Press in October, 2024.

Author’s website: www.lindanemecfoster.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Bone Country by Linda Nemec Foster, reviewed by Michael Collins for North of Oxford (April 2023), which the journal named “One of the Most Read Book Reviews of 2023”

⚡ Linda Nemec Foster’s Bone Country, a micro-review by Clare MacQueen in Issue 18 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (April 2023); includes links to two prose poems from the book that were first published in Issue 15 of MacQ

⚡ Featured Guest: Linda Nemec Foster interviewed by Tim Green for Rattlecast 157 (29 August 2022)

⚡ Personal Diary: Same Day, Same Month, Different Year, microfiction by Ms. Foster in Coal Hill Review (Issue 29, Spring 2022)

⚡ The Talent of Knowing, a poem by Ms. Foster in homage to her dear friend Richard in Duende (Issue 2, Spring 2015)