Poetry Publications

Judy Kronenfeld
Poetry: Books and Chapbooks

The Litchfield Review Press (Order Book)	Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths Judy Kronenfeld’s poems celebrate the world. Her eye for detail, exact and first-hand, coupled with her daring and intelligent arrangement of events, accomplish what poems at their best should—they cherish and preserve our lives so that we might find meaning in them alone—if we have to—as they shine in memory. By preserving her mid-century childhood—and further back and even more poignantly, the lives of her parents—Kronenfeld gives us poetry that makes sense of our little time and place on earth. These poems, steeped in the past, recapture the light of those lives and give us all some reprieve from loss as they master wonderfully “that ordinary happiness.” Christopher Buckley 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—her finest work yet—Kronenfeld writes with that sensuous cherishing of the world savored only by those who sense how easy it is to lose. Because of her delight, the 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. Molly Peacock In her aptly titled new volume, Judy Kronenfeld lavishes upon the reader her profound and illuminating meditations, songs, laments and odes exploring mortality and the vicissitudes of aging. Her “ghost words” reenact her childhood memories and adult visions which arise with haunting clarity and verisimilitude. With consummate skill, capacious feeling, and keen-eyed intelligence, Kronenfeld apprehends and renders “the terrible world” as being awash both in darkness and possibility, while offering the reader astonishing moments of self-knowledge, awe, gratitude, and reverence. In this lyrical and memorable collection, the poet also pays homage to the resilience of the family, and she honors the solemn or unexpected rituals that sustain its members. In so doing, Kronenfeld delves deeply into the greatest mysteries of the heart and spirit— wherein loss and longing, suffering and transcendence, co-exist—and delivers, through the doubled lenses of wisdom and tenderness, a world shimmering beyond death’s doors. Maurya Simon
	Reviewed in The Pedestal Magazine Reviewed in Poetica Also reviewed in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Volume 25, No. 2 (Summer,2009).

Finishing Line Books (Order Book)	What do we say when there’s nothing more to say? When those we’ve loved and those who’ve loved us, “the old and about-to-be-dead,” rise up from the ghost nurseries of memory and desire? Here, the imaginary doctors “pour the milk of space / into pitchers for your bedside table,” and, “like your dead mother, spit twice / and kiss your forehead.” Judy Kronenfeld reveals to us the tenderness and delicacy of this place, and of its inhabitants. She leads us as a parent would lead a small child, as a grown child would lead an aging parent—fearlessly and lovingly—into the reminiscence wing, the special neighborhood for the memory-impaired, the locked garden, the terrible world where, yet “the closed eyes of creatures move.” And she manages to say what, to me, had seemed unsayable: something about the unexpected beauty of death, after all. Cecilia Woloch

Inevitable Press, Laguna Poets Series [2000] (Out of Print ** )	Here’s a wry book of poems which penetrate to the heart of what it means to write poetry. . . . Like a painter in love with pigments, light, line, shadowy illusions, oily vehicles, various substrates, and the smell and taste of turpentine, Judy Kronenfeld is in love with the physical qualities of language. Though we usually think of only sound, the weight, color and texture of words catch her attention also. “We must feel the tongue dancing / free in the mouth.” She talks of “juicy, irreducible / tingling, nubby names,” and her mother’s “wedge of words.”. . . The poet’s heroic function is to write it all down so that you and I and our historians will have a clue as to what might be significant when we’re all dead and gone: “trivet,” “antimacassar,” “Uncle Benjamin,” the “disappeared,” your nightmare about “falling” . . . . Pat Cohee

Bellflower Press [1991] (Out of Print ** )	When Judy Kronenfeld writes of what she so aptly calls "The Romance of the Family," she is describing intensities of both love and pain. These are deeply felt poems, fresh, well-crafted and true. Linda Pastan Judy Kronenfeld's poems are repeated instances of what makes our lives bearable; understanding and kindness in ordinary matters. What we do every day her work transfigures into measures of love, made yet more precious by her tender sense of the mortality that shadows over them, like wings. These are poems to reread and live with. Roger Lathbury

** Limited copies of these collections are available through the Author .

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