Self-Portrait and Other Self-Portraits

Mark Anthony Cronin
Poetry
106 pgs.
2024
Paperback

This collection marks Cronin’s first sustained turn to poetry. The poems are brief, compressed, and unsentimental, written in a voice that keeps testing where thought gives way to belief, and where belief begins to feel like pressure rather than refuge. Moments of spiritual attention appear and vanish quickly, set against scenes of exhaustion, intimacy misfiring, and the difficulty of staying oriented to another person. What the book returns to again and again is proximity: how close language can come to what it wants without slipping into consolation. The poems read as attempts—sometimes steady, sometimes strained—to keep contact with something larger than immediate circumstance while remaining accountable to the limits of lived experience.