Home · Back

Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths

Judy Kronenfeld

“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, coexist-and delivers, through the doubled lenses of wisdom and tenderness, a world shimmering beyond death’s doors.” —Maurya Simon

“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 haveto-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

Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld was born in New York City and educated at Smith College and at Stanford University where she received a Ph.D. in English. She is the author of a previous full-length collection and two chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). She has also published criticism and reviews on Renaissance subjects in many scholarly journals, and a book on Shakespeare, KING LEAR and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke, 1998). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Women’s Review of Books, Poetry International, Natural Bridge, The Pedestal, Cimarron Review, Calyx, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Hiram Poetry Review, among many others; they have also appeared in a number of anthologies including Red, White and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (Iowa, 2004), and Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006). Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The Madison Review, The North American Review, Under the Sun, and Chelsea, among other places. She has taught English literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine and Purdue University and, since 1984, has taught in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside.

Judy Kronenfeld lives in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband. They are the parents of a grown son and daughter.