Orations Delivered While Lying on My Belly

Mark Anthony Cronin
Fiction, Poetry
300 pgs.
2024
Paperback

Spanning 300 pages, ORATIONS gathers a year of stories and poems drawn from the author’s near-daily writing practice on Substack. The pieces vary widely in length and form—some compressed to their bare materials, others sprawling, digressive, and unfiltered—reflecting the conditions under which they were written rather than a unified aesthetic plan. What holds the book together is persistence: the steady return to the page, the willingness to leave seams visible, and an attention to thought as it moves, stalls, doubles back, or overshoots its mark. Cronin treats error as method rather than flaw, allowing missteps, excess, and unfinished turns to remain part of the record. The result is a book shaped by accumulation and exposure, charting how daily writing sharpens, exhausts, and occasionally breaks the mind that produces it.