"Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!" by Judy Kronenfeld

Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! is a paean to the author’s mid-twentieth century Bronx childhood as the sole offspring of warmly loving—if sometimes provincial, overprotective, or embarrassing—immigrant parents. It is also about the wonder of lifelong memory itself, of how the past continually offers itself up as a field to contemplate, a field of rediscovery and new discovery of one’s native landscape, and of the actions, rituals, and language—with all their redolence and significance—of those long gone whom one still loves.

Editing and Direction by Dennis Callaci
Poem/Reading by Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of two previous chapbooks and six books of poetry including If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2nd ed, Antrim House, 2012). Her poems have appeared in more than four dozen anthologies and in many journals including Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad and Your Daily Poem.
A Stanford PhD in English, Judy has also published short stories, creative nonfiction, and criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998)—a rather muckraking book challenging post-structuralist Shakespeare criticism on historical and linguistic grounds. She is a four-time Pushcart nominee and has also been nominated for Best of the Net and serves as an Associate Editor of Poemeleon.
Judy taught English Literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine and Purdue University, and is now Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside, having retired in 2009 after more than two decades teaching there. She has attempted, but is never sure she has succeeded at crossing the boundary between the divided and distinguished worlds of academic criticism and creative writing. A native New Yorker, raised in the Bronx, Judy has lived most of her life in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband. Their middle-aged children and four grandchildren live (way too!) far away in Maryland.

I read this slender chapbook of twenty poems on a long walk to a cafe. Friends—chapbooks are superior to poetry collections. I say it and I mean it...

Well, okay...both serve different purposes, but how lovely it is to have a book-walk and a book that lasts just as long as the walk. I turned the page after the last poem and went "omigosh! that was the last poem!" about a block from Turtle Bread.

Kronenfeld's collection—the perfect size to slip into a functional pocket—is neat and cohesive. A complete experience. And that's what is so great about a chapbook—it's tighter than a whole collection. But let me stop rambling on and get to the meat of this review...

Nostalgia is a form of time travel, and, for me, like any other kind of motion sickness, I find a jaunt through the past nausea-making. But how beautiful it was to read these poems, which render moments from the poet's past with incredible detail, such that each scene unfolded with slo-mo cinematic precision. I was moved time and time again, in love with the same people the poet loves because of her tender rendering. Kronenfeld reminds me to slow down in my own poems and linger, to spend more time with the people and places, to make them three-dimensional, before moving on. Let me give you an example from the first poem in the collection, "The Fedora":

And now my risen father reaches in
to lift his woolen overcoat
from its broad and sculpted wooden hanger.
The nearby clothes stir slightly on the rod.
I watch him as he hoists the heavy tweed
over one shoulder, slides his arm into a sleek sleeve,
feels behind to find the other armhole,
then takes hold of the lapels and gives the coat
a little shake into into its proper place.

Details like these—so seemingly inconsequential—enable the reader to know the people in the poems intimately by their small gestures. And isn't a life built from a series of gestures? You can hear, too, the instinctive music in Kronenfeld's lines—the slant rhymes and alliteration. That's part of the pleasure, too.

My last note on this collection: I love the use of the em dash in these poems. It started to feel like a little diving board hanging there at the end of lines that I could bounce on before plunging into personal history.

Actually, one more note! What a relief to read a collection of poems about family that eschews dysfunction. So nice to step out of my own life and into the kindness of another's.

Poetry Review #19, Sonia Greenfield

July 16, 2024