Splendor

Signed copies available in limited supply Steve Kronen's poems explore the hardships that daily challenge the human heart. From such hardships, compassion and empathy arise. Some of the poems in Splendor focus on our inescapable vulnerability due to aging or accident.  Splendor also includes a number of love poems to the author's wife and daughter. And because he feels that the first person is often claustrophobic and enervating, much of the book looks beyond self and family. Many of the poems are rhymed and metered and play with formal elements. Throughout are sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, a Dantean canzone, nonce forms, and others. From the New York Times Book Review (December 10, 2006): "You'd have to look to Paul Muldoon to find a more outrageous end-rhymer than Kronen. Or a quieter one. Kronen works extensively in fixed (and some feral) forms, but his lines, like Muldoon's, tend to be so metrically irregular and heavily enjambed that even the full rhymes barely register. It's a