“Judy Kronenfeld's Groaning and Singing is a heart on paper, wide open with memory, detail, reverence; and recollection so vivid you will think you are there with the writer. Parents feature in these lyrical narratives; we know their flaws and their grace. Death is present, that’s inevitable, yet these poems triumph over loss with a ringing affirmation for the past. Poetry heals as it’s being written, and Kronenfeld’s collection of stories has a philosophical underpinning about how we transcend our daily troubles. The book also has a social conscience, and a sharp look at society: ‘Bless us all, social beasts that we are’ ... and always, in each poem, a merciful look at our common humanity.”

“Judy Kronenfeld’s new collection is a rare treasure that looks back, looks in and pierces into the present. Memoria, eros, aging, death and the miraculous tracings of Kronenfeld’s “blessed wounds” are in motion—that is, the body, time and space of her immigrant Jewish roots, her parents, her Bronx. Full of heart and “astonishing messages” (and rage at the violence of these times), family close-ups, woman-portraits and fearless writing, this is a poetry we must read, carefully, intimately. Bravo, Judy! One of a brave kind.”

“Judy Kronenfeld is a Southern Californian/Ex-New Yorker who’s crossed geographies and decades with her eyes and her heart open. In these fine poems she gives us the fruits of her journeying, some as close to home as the checkout line where we stand ‘ambivalent as mid-afternoon’ and some so globally empathetic that she can write about the mothers of ‘martyred’ babies on one side and soldiers on the other–war victims both: ‘The romance / of a meaningful death must be so brief.’ Kronenfeld’s nearly photographic eye knows that ‘night falls fast, / so fast, piling up in steep/soft drifts, canceling / cornice, column, piling up / in streets of ash and embers’ and yet her poems show us how careful attention continues to enrich us–‘ You still see nothing / that is not there, / but now you sense everything / that is.’”

“Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths gives us Judy Kronenfeld at the height of her powers. In this generous collection of poems of memory and aging...Kronenfeld writes with that sensuous cherishing of the world savored only by those who sense how easy it is to lose.... [Her] poems, even when they don't mention light at all, are filled with clear air, clarity of thought, and the complementary radiances of remembrance and imagination.”