“Aunts” is from Lynn Strongin’s forthcoming collection, Skimming Ecstasy, written in loving memory of Elliot Hochstein, who saved Lynn’s life when Lynn was 12.
Aunts
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
No pinafored aunt
Time softened at the edges in the lace parlor, plum wine decanted
Marked my greatest doctor.
Hands moved with the gentleness of a dancer.
The unmarried sit
Sunday afternoons pure
Describing a perfect circle.
Facts fall like sunlight
Held in hands turned,
Knitting, wrapping child in towel, quiet churchlike, exact as a doctor.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Poetry | Back to Volume 20, Issue 1 – Summer 2026
About the Author
Born and raised in New York City to first-generation Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Romania, Lynn Strongin contracted polio at age twelve and is paralyzed from the waist down. She earned a Bachelor’s with Honors from Hunter College and a Master of Arts from Stanford University. Lynn won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. She has published twelve books, her work appears in thirty or so anthologies, she worked for the American poet Denise Levertov, and she received encouragement from Kay Boyle, Robert Duncan, and Robert Frost. Lynn was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book, Spectral Freedom. Reflecting on Strongin’s poetry, Laura Chester, co-editor of Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets (Simon and Schuster, 1973), writes, “Outrage, talent, and voice meld together into something sublime, like an unearthly blue, rising above pain to create images that are so pure, they almost hurt. Is this prose or is this poetry, or perhaps a new form altogether, one that rises above and goes beyond?” Danielle Ofri, M.D., Ph.D., author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine (Beacon Press, 2014) and Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, notes of Strongin’s memoir, “In this tender and probing memoir, Lynn Strongin traces a life shaped by illness, upheaval, and the quiet resilience of language navigating the aftermath of polio, the ache of dislocation, and the long shadow of loss, she probes how memory and poetry can both fracture and mend the self.” Lynn was nominated for the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, British Columbia’s most prestigious literary honor. This nomination recognizes her extensive and enduring contributions to poetry and prose over a career spanning several decades. Her new book, Circling the Lime Trees, will be published by Cyberwit later this year.