When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems

Shakespeare's Hamlet begins with the line, "Who's there?" Jennifer L. Freed's remarkably moving new book explores that same question, with particular insight into those caught with parents suddenly needing immediate and constant care. The poems are as clear-eyed and well made as any poetry I've read in years, the focus so precise that lines literally seem alive with truth and emotional impact. Freed captures the enormity of the ordeal, yet always with vast measures of strength, compassion, and the deepest love. Who's there for them, we find ourselves asking. Who's there for any of us with our parents slipping away, our lives made so hard, our children's dreams deferred? The answer is found in these stunning poems, which can literally change your life.

John Hodgen, winner of the AWP Prize in Poetry

Jennifer L. Freed writes of breath and heartbeat, of love and frustration in the aftermath of her mother's stroke. In these poems we see a father's frailty, a mother's altered sensibility, a brother's death, and her own step-by-step survival. Freed uses line breaks, spacing, fragments and repetition to evoke institutional medical bureaucracy as well as overwhelming, inarticulate emotion. In "My Father's Heart" she takes the reader inside her father's grief and confusion (left-justified) while across the page on the right, the parenthetical heartbeat forms a refrain (his heart, his heart, his heart). In "Week After Week," she tells of her sudden new role as caregiver to both parents: "I am holding my mother's dreams / to her lips./ I am wrapping my father's dread / in soft songs." This is a book built on great love, hope, and acceptance.

Susan Roney-O'Brien, author of Thira, Bone Circle and Legacy of the Last World

Jennifer L. Freed's When Light Shifts is a moving memoir focussing on the months immediately after her mother survived a severe stroke. This 61-poem collection (including eleven poems from The Samuel Allen Washington Prize-winning sequence, "Cerebral Hemorrhage") depicts, in haunting detail, the disorienting and treacherous up-is-down, left-is-right, floor-rising-and-falling-ship-deck world her mother-and other family members as well-must learn to navigate in hospital, in rehab and finally at home. It is an honest, brave book.

Bryan R. Monte, Editor/Publisher of Amsterdam Quarterly