Chasing Northern Lights by Rebecca Fremo

About the Author

Rebecca Fremo is currently Associate Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College, where she teaches a variety of courses, including Academic Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and Teaching Writing: Theory and Practice. Her poems have appeared in Water~Stone Review, Lake Region Review, The Tidal Basin Review, Poetica, Naugatuck River Review, and River Poets Journal. Her work also also appears in County Lines: 87 Minnesota Counties, 130 Minnesota Poets (Loonfeather Press). A Richmond, Virginia native, she now braves the Minnesota winters with her husband and three sons.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Rebecca Fremo’s work is full of kind irony—exact words, images, and grounded feelings. “Hands respond when language fails,” one poem says, but she never lets it fail.–John Calvin Rezmerski

Rebecca Fremo’s first collection is, among other things, “a country song,” and, like all good country songs, there’s romance, humor, and a good assortment of trucks, tractors, and motorcycles. Who would have thought that an Eastern transplant would express such heartfelt affection for the Midwestern landscape and the smell of “fresh hay and lilacs”? These poems are the chronicles of a woman in motion, “chasing northern lights,” running country roads, and always back in time for the science fair and a flower or two. –Joyce Sutphen

These quite robust and shapely poems of Rebecca Fremo’s map a clear and delineated topography of her own very present and immediate world. She follows William Carlos Williams’ dictum of searching and then discovering the universal in those small yet all-important particulars of the local. From jogging the gravel roads of Boyd, Minnesota to witnessing Jesus’ “banana bright car” parked in the parking lot of the local dentist, to excursions to San Antonio and a return home to Richmond Virginia for her Jewish grandmother’s funeral, these poems give us full scope of the longitudes and latitudes of place and region, made anew again by this poet’s fine, attentive ear and eye. These poems are crafted with a subtle surveyor’s sense of those small but important landmarks that make up the real places in our world. These graceful and superbly spoken poems go on to carefully map and then name them all.
–Philip S. Bryant

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]