Sowing the Wind: A Requiem in the Modern World

Poetry. A long gnostic poem, SOWING THE WIND interrogates modern notions of friendship, which, compromised by possession, need, and performance, becomes simply and essentially another expression of change.

As a writer, critic, editor, and teacher, Ed Foster is inveterately Apollonian: lucid, balanced, well organized. --American Book Review

[Foster's poetry] reads in its entirety like a hymn to intellectual beauty. Its mood is almost always one of deep contemplation, a search for harmony among tangled relations. Each poem is an attempt to bring an inner light to the surface of the paper. The desire for intimacy is reverential, yet restrained and warmed by a private friction. This results in a language that is measured in its tone and sensuality, that is somehow able to be personal and impersonal simultaneously. Each word has a feeling of critical distinction, as if distilled out of some more turbulent compound of longing and agitation.--Jacket2

Edward Foster's poetry, always exacting and infinitely sweeping, comes to us like a whisper from behind our own ears... His 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. With pristine lucidity, he knows, the 'propositions weren't enough.'
--Brooklyn Rail