Jennifer Kronovet is the author of the poetry collection Awayward. She co-translated The Acrobat, the selected poems of experimental Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin. Under the name Jennifer Stern she co-translated Empty Chairs, the poetry of Chinese writer Liu Xia. She is author of The Wug Test: Poems (Ecco), a collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry, and winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.
