Bird Flying through the Banquet - Paperback

by Rachel L. Macaulay (Editor), Judy Kronenfeld (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Judy Kronenfeld's poems have appeared in many journals, such as American Poetry Journal, Avatar, Calyx, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Innisfree, Natural Bridge, Sequestrum, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Valparaiso Review, and in more than twenty anthologies including Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse, 2012), and Far Out: Poems of the 60s (Wings Press, 2016). Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Under the Sun and Hippocampus, among others. Her previous collections of poetry include Shimmer (WordTech, 2012) and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012), winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside, and an Associate Editor of the online journal, Poemeleon. A long-ago transplanted New Yorker, she lives with her husband in Riverside, when they are not visiting far-flung children and grandchildren.