Steve Kronen

From its nonce villanelles to its Miami stornelli, Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer is a masterful display of linguistic dexterity and formal invention. This is writing that engages both the heart and the intellect even as it performs high-order poetic hijinks of the sort Richard Wilbur and Paul Muldoon would admire. A terrific book from a poet of depth and originality.

         –Campbell McGrath

Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer is a collection that hangs in the balance – between the apocalyptic and the everyday, fate and choice, love and death. Like nuclear fission itself, these poems transmute themselves, taking on the forms of twisted sestinas and transformational terza rima to take on the constant movement of their subject matter: the business of being a person with an awareness of both science and God. From abstract associations that shift from the universal to the specific, Kronen pares his poems down to still, sparse considerations of enduring love, fatherhood, free will and, finally, our uniquely human awareness of oblivion. This collection is at once poignant, funny, and distortedly original.

About the Author:

Steve Kronen grew up in Miami. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, New Statesman, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, Little Star, Shenandoah, Plume,The Antioch Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Awards include an NEA, three Florida Individual Artist fellowships, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, the James Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, and fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.