Ghost Nurseries

by Judy Kronenfeld

"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 something about the unexpected beauty of death, after all." Cecilia Woloch

30 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of six books and three chapbooks of poetry, as well as a critical-historical-linguistic study of Shakespeare's King Lear, King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke U.P. 1998). Her most recent poetry collection is a chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! published by Bamboo Dart Press on June 20, 2024. Previous collections include If Only There Were Stations of the Air, published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024, Groaning and Singing, published by FutureCycle Press in 2022, Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle in 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and the second edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (Antrim House, 2012). Her poems, as well as more occasional short stories and personal essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals. Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems was published by Inlandia Books in early 2025. Judy taught for twenty-five years at UC Riverside, and is now Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Creative writing.