Strongin's language is muscular, challenging, disarming, and utterly unexpected as she journeys through childhood illness to the demands of age, circling, looking back, returning always to the body's insistent desires:
The need roughens in me to have love. The way the paper has tooth.
I have never read anything like it.
-Rachel Rose, Poet Laureate, Vancouver, BC Lynn Strongin is a force of nature.
-Chase Twichell, Winner of the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Award Fascinating work.
-Alicia Ostriker, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Lynn Strongin has written a book that reintroduces us to ourselves, to the naked spirit of ourselves, and this accomplishment is very rare. In the shadow of her words, a cold wind kicks up. Then slowly, deftly, she weaves a 25-part hymn to steadfastness and grace, to a lifetime of physical deprivation, spiritual yearning and barely held-back exultation in each sensory gift. Each poem in
Burn
leaves its imprint, its scald-mark, on us.
-Charles Adès Fishman, Winner of the 2012 New Millennium Award for Poetry & the 2014 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for Poetry Strongin puts the verve back into verse. The acuity with which her older woman narrator investigates life is rare and invigorating.
-Betsy Warland, Author of
Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing