She Decided to Call Her First Child London

Whether it be England or America, Amelia Earhart or a commoner, war or wedding, this collection of poems paints your imagination with visions of them all.“In Lynn Strongin’s work, bread suddenly becomes ‘the color of buffalo’. Strongin magnifies the world around us.” – Hugh Fox, late great poet and critic“Lynn Strongin’s poems carefully explore historical memory and a sense of recovery with a lyricism that is never sentimental, but disciplined, complex. She explores… how to live after the blade, to live as either wounded or as a ghost. I love the notion of secret history, the beatitudes and brutalisms behind all our grander… fictions.” – Jonathan Minton“Accept Lynn Strongin’s invitation into this magical kingdom of bees, lambs and foxes. Wish too: ‘We can only afford to push away what we utterly possess.’” – Glenna Luschei, poet and publisher

Born in New York City at the end of the 'dirty thirties', Lynn Strongin grew up as a musical child with a psychologist father and freelance artist mother. Following her parents' divorce in the mid nineteen-forties when this was still not widespread, the second trauma of her childhood was contracting polio at age twelve. However, this allowed her to develop a gift for introspection. After studying musical composition, she went on to take a graduate degree in American literature and poetry at Stanford University. She is now totally devoting her life to poetry. She has written extensively about polio, the war years, and post-war life in her autobiography; INDIGO: An American Jewish Childhood. Her book SPECTRAL FREEDOM was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. She has made British Columbia, Canada, her home for the past thirty years, but still considers herself an American voice. Other subjects important to her are the American South, women's freedom, and the injustices done to girls and women in such institutions as the Magdalene Laundries.