Review by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice
In her most recent and Pulitzer-prize nominated collection, Bone Country, author Linda Nemec Foster takes readers on a breathless tour through Europe and especially her beloved Poland. Yet, these crystalline prose poems are no flaneur or tourist takes; they are attempts to grapple with belonging and boundaries, to reify the bridges to those who are bone-close, yet unreachable. In a collection whose title calls to mind Dickinson’s “Zero at the Bone,” Foster circles, approaches, and retreats, touching those places and people both vital and ultimately unknowable.
Foster is the author of 14 collections of poetry, the first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, and a 2024 Distinguished Favorite in the NYC’s Big Book Award in Poetry. She has long investigated relationship to place, body, and others in her prose and poetry.
In Bone Country, the reader travels the globe, stopping mainly in Europe, and, most importantly, Poland, the country of Foster’s grandmother and deep, living roots. We visit Istanbul, Warsaw, Bratislava, Hong Kong, Toledo, Prague, Rome, Cleveland, Seville, Paris, Kraków, and beyond. We meet priests, fellow passengers, diplomats, arrogant painters and poets, maids, hunchbacks, an Irish wedding guest, and Russian tourists. In “The Judge from Central Poland,” we watch a man perform the wedding of a nervous couple, the “bride in a mint green dress, curling-ironed bangs.” He will go home to “a cold dinner of blood sausage, cabbage, and parsley potatoes with a distracted wife.” In “Still There,” the speaker returns decades later to a two-lane highway between Warsaw and Łódź and witnesses a lone prostitute—“tiny white dress, tiny white chair, tiny white cell phone”–waiting for truckers and tourists. Reading each snapshot, a universe of movement and leaping imagination within the frame of the prose poem, I felt I was walking with Whitman, observing, cataloging, honoring, democratizing. For every stranger we meet, Foster dreams her way into their lives.
So many of these settings are surreal and uneasily defined: borderlands, outskirts, edge lands, landscapes rushing by train windows, riverbanks at dusk, foggy mountain tops between two countries. In “Man Praying in a Field” somewhere between Warsaw and Poznań, the speaker watches a figure first lie down in supplication on the hard earth, then, as dusk approaches, “[b]arely remembering who he is, . . . walk away—each foot lightly blessing the ground.” Boundaries, time, even reality also come into question in “Stadtpark, Graz,” where the speaker compares this outskirt of Vienna to a “neverland nestled in a map near the Slovene border,” and where a monk questions, “Where am I going?” and “the shadows of the dogs and the drunks collide.”
In these liminal spaces, the people we observe are equally reachable and unreachable. Foster embodies this tension with paradox, an “inside/outside” sensibility, collage, and thematic codas. In “Amber Museum, Gdańsk,” she ends with a description of the speaker– “Her life, surrounded by myth”–that rings true for the entire book. Held in a layered timelessness, Foster still throws out lines to connect, and commands us to do so, as well, primarily through imagination, art, and color. In a café in Switzerland, the speaker imagines a life for the man at the next table, observing how he, despite having a dead wife, “still dreams her alive.” The poem ends with a leap that takes my breath away, as he envisions his wife berating his choice of a burger: “Think of your heart. Your congested, breaking heart.” Whether she imagines the dreams of sleepers past and future who share a pillow in a Białystok hotel, a young woman’s memory of cutting lemons in her mother’s orchard in Jordan, a stranger in a bar as her own husband, or a fellow plane passenger as her dead mother, Foster never lets us forget the inner life.
For me, finally, Foster’s ruminations on geography, history, and the people we observe and meet undergird a more terrible tension, that between ourselves and those we love most and cannot reach: our mothers, daughters, grandmothers we never met. There is the daughter in the Colosseum “who rarely talks to her mother . . . who likes . . . the cool reticence of the ancient marble that has witnessed so much . . . but still maintains its distance.” And there is the daughter’s actual picture—”almost unrecognizable”–amongst the “holy cards and family pictures” on the wall of a priest’s rectory.
Always, though, there is consciousness of the pull across the divide.
Despite the separations, silences, and spaces between, Foster never stops trying to bridge the gap. Whether the “deep cobalt of the night’s blue bowl” that stretches above us; the red of blood and hibiscus bloom; the names we pass down; or the trees that move in the wind, the world offers possibility for connection. Perhaps most moving to me, and hopeful, is the fragile balance of mother/child bond evoked in “On Leaving Seville.” Looking out as if from a plane window, the speaker imagines the blossoming of the green plain into a single tree, “its top branches filled with stork nests, as if it possesses flat hands that open effortlessly like wings to hold the long-necked birds feeding their young so casually, it makes the sky weep.”
Through this grappling, Foster’s art achieves an almost ineffable beauty that leaves me aching. For, this is the work of art, of living in this fractured world, and of being a mother. It is the work of love. In the penultimate poem of her collection, “After the Thunderstorm,” for Zbigniew Herbert, Foster writes: “After the thunderstorm, we don’t care about history or consequence. Only about love: who has it and who doesn’t.”
In the spaces between, Foster urges us to reach for art, imagination, empathy, color, and the natural world, and to keep trying—even in the face of impossibility—to connect to the geographies and relationships of our bone countries.
Bone Country: Prose Poems by Linda Nemec Foster
Cornerstone Press, 2023
ISBN 979-8986966311
Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems published in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Still: The Journal (Judge’s Choice Award), and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Lodged in the Belly (2024), was published by Main Street Rag. A long-time high school English teacher with literature degrees from Brown University and Indiana-Bloomington, she lives in Florida with her wife. Reach her at jhdracostice.com/.