The Burn Poems

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 Ades 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