Dire Straits

Poetry. Foster writes with great economy. His words feel chiseled and dovetailed into place. Like Zukofsky, Foster evinces the metilculous care of a seasoned cabinet maker. But it is out of this economy that he finds the richness that he is looking for…. Foster, who likes the muted registers and stunning clarity of the black and white photography he often includes in his books, is engrossed by the dialectic between art and life and the complexities and ambiguities of human emotion. This is his strait. His narrows. He doesn’t just articulate ideas, he struggles against them. His poetry has as edgy undercurrent. It doesn’t settle. It searches for where the words begin.–John Olson

Edward Foster’s…poems suspend themselves just above language, connotative of some understanding–perhaps common to all of us–that recedes at the brink of words. It is just on this cusp, with some doubt, some explaining, that we find Foster, and trust him to guide us on an impossible course.–The Brooklyn Rail