Jennifer Freed Publishes Debut Poetry Collection

From today's Boston Globe:

 

Debut poetry collection

In her moving and powerful debut collection, “When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems” (Kelsay), Jennifer L. Freed writes of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage and its aftermath. She captures the surreality of the world continuing to spin in the midst of crisis. Her mother has a stroke on the driveway, as “The chipmunks raced on round the junipers. / The sun went on bleaching the clapboards.” A matter-of-factness speaks to the gravity of the moment: sometimes facts are all we can express. Freed’s poems are precise, but never unfeeling, and she is alert to the moments when words won’t take us where we need to go. These poems operate in the deepest wells of experience: fear and frustration and love and pain. “If I can name what I miss, / will I know where to look — / how to find it in her?”

Here website is here:  https://jfreed.weebly.com/

Here is Jennifer's bio:

Jennifer L. Freed is the author of When Light Shifts (Kelsay, 2022), based on the aftermath of her mother's stroke, and of a chapbook, These Hands Still Holding, a finalist in the 2013 New Women's Voices Competition (Finishing Line Press, 2014).  She was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize for a long poem or poem-sequence (New England Poetry Club), has been a finalist for the Frank O'Hara prize multiple times, and has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Orison Anthology.  She writes and teaches in Massachusetts.

Less recently, Jennifer Freed's non-fiction describing her experiences as an English language teacher in Sichuan, China, was published in The Yale-China Review, and, in Chinese translation, in Cultural Meetings: American Writers, Scholars, and Artists in China (Guangxi Normal University Press).  

Her articles about life in Prague in the 1990s, shortly after the fall of the communist government, appeared in the travel section of The Boston Globe.