Dream Bones, Poems by Linda A. Cronin
In Linda A. Cronin’s Dream Bones, bones are betrayers, wobbling and collapsing when they should stand tall and strong: the body, therefore, must search elsewhere for strength, stability, something firm to rely on. These dramatic poems enact that search with grace and power.
Sample Poems by Linda A. Cronin
Linda Cronin's Website
“Wisdom, grace, and a fierce, direct address are the hallmarks of Linda Cronin’s debut collection of poetry. With her dead-on insight and matter-of-fact tone, Cronin’s is a voice we can trust to delve into the dilemmas of living. She is our poker-faced chronicler of human capacities for the adjustment to limitation, the poet to go to for clear-headed, clear-sighted reportage of the human condition’s foibles and wonder. No one writes quite like her: observant, candid, capacious, a story-teller to the core, but with a lyric heart.”—Molly Peacock
“In Dream Bones, Linda Cronin’s powerful poems help us to find the kernel of hope amid suffering and physical pain. In honest, direct poems Cronin reaches past all our defenses and connects us to our own humanity. She earns our respect and admiration as we cry and smile with her and applaud her indomitable spirit. This is a book not to be missed and heralds the arrival an amazing poet.”—Maria Mazziotti Gillan
“The poems and flash-fiction pieces in Linda Cronin’s Dream Bones are missives from a world few of us know. From a body that wracks and betrays rise works full of wry humor, deft and brilliant clarity, and expansive praise. We see the speaker “struggling to keep up on Halloween” as rheumatoid arthritis is diagnosed in childhood, and we follow her in treatment as she diagnoses her acupuncturist: ‘I wonder about him, /a doctor who admits sticking needles in people/makes his heart sing.’ Cronin captures the horror of baroque procedures in the slyly titled ‘Being Fitted for My Halo,’ in which we are invited to process the simple facts about ‘…metal screws/ that insert into the skull, / the patient’s skull, my skull.’ In tandem with these dry-eyed and practical observations are love poems of great tenderness and gratitude to the family that has always seen beyond the speaker’s illness to the heart of this ferocious, funny woman, who captures the mundane as aptly as she does the horrific, as when, in ‘Jersey Girl,’ she offers us ‘…the extra large plastic coated menu/ with more pages than the local paper.’ Dream Bones is a work of rich alchemy, a triumph.”—Cat Doty
“The narrator of Cronin’s Dream Bones lives in a body at war with itself; she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis. These poems and flash essays embrace recollections of childhood health as well as an awareness of a reality shaped by a body that torments and continues to fail. Yet there is no failure in the speaker. Despite an agonizing realism, there is a consistent, unsentimental affirmation of life here. With characteristic pragmatism, she speaks of ‘waiting,/for some doctor…to fix [her],/like a car waiting for the mechanic’—there is no self-pity, no glossing over with platitudes. Instead, the collection is filled with brutal detail, gratitude, and introspection. Read these pieces and learn about strength.”—Renée Ashley
ISBN 978-1934999967, 112 pages, $18.00
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