Living in the Fire Nest

Ridgeway Press
Detroit, MI
1996

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“This is a big book, forceful and tender, encompassing Chartres and Woodward Ave., magicians and nightmares, Jonah and Jesse James, Chinese acrobats, Zambian women drying fish, and La Dolce Vita in the living room. Families are here with all their nuances of feeling, yet many poems have the scope of myth or fairy tale.”

Conrad Hilberry

  • “…I can hear you laughing in your house
    the foundations shaking and you
    wrapped in animal skins wanting her
    closer, your breath in her mouth
    closer.”

    from the poem, “The Peasant Woman Tells How Baba Yaga Took Her Grandmother”

Notable Review

“In poem after brilliant poem, Linda Nemec Foster presents us with the balancing acts people perform as they move between their ordinary lives and the secret lives they imagine. A housewife burns the dinner she is cooking while she imagines herself as a glamorous character in the movie she is watching. A man scanning the tabloid headlines at the supermarket checkout is overwhelmed by his insignificance. A mother dreams herself as a sparrow outside her daughter’s window. Even in her most autobiographical poems, Foster finds the strangeness that gives meaning to everyday events, her imagination being as boundless as her sympathy. Her inventiveness culminates in the book’s final section, “A History of the Body,” a tour de force consisting of twenty-four exuberant, origin legends.”

Lisel Mueller

News

Michigan Writers Series First Interview in 1999

/in , /by

Audio: Interview with Jane Arnold Program Introduction by Diane Wakoski Selected Readings: “Postcard“ “History of the Toenails“ “History of the Hand“ “Heat Lightning“ Movie Poems: “Absurdity of the Sweet Life,” “At 69,” “My Mother Sees Her First Foreign Film“ “Ars Poetica“ “The Therapeutist: After Magritte“ “The Rain in Bielsko,” and “Mazovian Willows: Chopin’s Nocturn, Opus […]

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Accolades

YearHonorPrizeDescription
1997Finalist The Poet’s Prize Linda’s book, Living in the Fire Nest, was selected by juror Colette Inez for this honor that is sponsored by the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City

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