books
Dear Stranger Poems by Jenny Browne
UT Press, 2013
ISBN-13: 978-159732111-2
71 pages
“Set beside contemporaries whose poems consist largely of alienated critique, Browne stands out for her ordinary affections; set beside more populist writers who proclaim their ordinariness, she stands out (and evades sentimentality) because her reactions to her life remain so strange…Her poems retain the unpredictability not of a roulette wheel or a supernova, but of a quirky, wise friend in another city, one whose reactions surprise us even once we know her enough to trust her well.” -Stephen Burt in The Believer
“In the first poem in Jenny Browne’s terrific, moving, disturbing new book, Dear Stranger, she conjures a blue parakeet loyal to the sky/inside it’s dented cage and I know she’s talking about me. And she’s talking about you. Trapped, glorious, heart broken, beautiful, capable of impossible flights, the creatures in this book look just like us. There’s so much heart, so much astringent and generous observation in Browne’s poems that I came away from them feeling X-rayed. Which is a good thing. Jenny Browne’s poems are a very good thing.” -Erin Belieu
“The angel-fisted lyrics in Jenny Browne’s newest collection invent a new body by which to measure the evolution of our intelligent seeing and breathing. A profound, spiritual brilliance undergirds, and we are the living possibility of its artful culmination. Read on.” -Major Jackson
The Second Reason Poems by Jenny Browne
UT Press, 2008
ISBN-10: 1597320366
ISBN-13: 978-1597320368
85 pages
“In her new collection of poems, The Second Reason, Jenny Browne emerges as a poet of tre-mendous depth and range. The poems here approach both the details of the domestic life and the strangeness of consciousness with equal attention. The work is musical, spiritual, and physical the poet serving as an observant linguistic and sensual guide to all the things that matter love, suffering, and pleasure with her precise and inventive lines. There is a surprising calm in the wild leaps this poetry makes, as if the poet is at home with the unpredictable and intent upon bringing us there with her.” – Laura Kasischke
“The Second Reason is wild and beautiful and surprising. In this poet’s hands the seemingly mundane is transformed into the nearly sacred, the elemental reveals its inner mysteries, and scraps of overheard language dissolve into a song. Jenny Browne is a poet of alchemy, and these poems embody wonder. – Nick Flynn
What charm and beauty, what observational skill, what originality, what panache we find in Jenny Browne’s The Second Reason. These poems are laced with danger the knives on the wall are lined up by size she warns in one poem and humor put your hand in the air if you’ve heard / the one about the hokey pokey man, she directs in another. Browne deftly moves from prose poem to found poem to haunting and terse lyrics grounded in a strange landscape: poems about children and childbirth with the backdrop of terrorism and 9/11. as she writes with characteristic off-center understatement: In my country orange means/everyone should be a little more/ afraid than usual. This is a volume that should not be missed.” – Beth Ann Fennelly
At Once Poems by Jenny Browne
UT Press, 2003
ISBN-10: 187985287X
ISBN-13: 978-1879852877
112 pages
“At Once manages to combine sublime feasts with great fragility to produce work that celebrates the knowingness of heart and bone, skin and soul. It’s as if time stood still for a moment after chiseled moment to let these poems work their enduring magic” -Barbara Ras
“These breath-taking poems seem to spring from an indelible well of perception. her words restore and transport us. I love the gracious way she gathers elements, her fluid movement among well-weighted images, her sensibility which is pure energy and compassion with a vivid streaking light. Her poems honor and illuminate everything they consider with deep intelligence and care. Oh how we need her.” – Naomi Shibab Nye
Glass Poetry chapbook by Jenny Browne
Pecan Grove Press, 2000
ISBN-10: 1877603694
ISBN-13: 978-1877603693
48 pages