Steve Kronen's poems explore the hardships that daily challenge the human heart. Some of the poems in Splendor focus on our inescapable vulnerability due to aging or accident. Splendor also includes love poems to the author's wife and daughter. Many of the poems are rhymed and metered and use formal elements such as sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, a Dantean canzone, nonce forms, and others.

Steve Kronen's first book, Empirical Evidence (1992), won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Poems from Splendor have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.