Self-Portrait and Other Self-Portraits

Mark Anthony Cronin
Poetry
106 pgs.
2023
Paperback

This collection marks Cronin’s first sustained turn to poetry. The poems are brief, compressed, unsentimental. The voice keeps testing the point where thought tips into belief, where belief begins to bear on the speaker with a kind of demand. Moments of spiritual attention appear and pass quickly, set against scenes of fatigue, intimacy misfiring, and the effort of staying oriented to another person. The book returns to proximity: how close language can come to what it seeks while still holding its shape. The poems proceed as attempts—at times steady, at times strained—to maintain contact with something larger than immediate circumstance while remaining answerable to the limits of lived experience.