Bird Flying through the Banquet

In her fourth book of poems, Judy Kronenfeld re-invokes and searches for her swiftly receding first-generation urban past and the lives of her dead-particularly her working-class immigrant parents-with love, terror, realism, and humor. Childhood memories illuminate puzzles, almost heal, tantalize with mystery. They recast themselves in imagination and dreams: her dead parents play Scrabble in their Bronx kitchen, though neither can spell. Kronenfeld explores vulnerability: not quite belonging to the worlds she rises into, or the America of her adulthood; moments when we cannot ask for what we most need. With precision, wit, and inventive metaphor, she bodies forth the role of attentiveness in love and art, casts a wry eye on the relation of young and old, and on politics and power. She casts a clear, yet not unmoved eye on endings-others’, and her own. And sometimes, the ever-present present transcends the flow of time.