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The Second Reason Poems by Jenny Browne
UT Press, 2007 ISBN-10: 1597320366 ISBN-13: 978-1597320368 85 pages, 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches Also available in Hardcover
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| Description
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. Reviews 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 |
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At Once
Poems by Jenny Browne
UT Press, 2003 ISBN-10: 187985287X ISBN-13: 978-1879852877 112 pages, 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
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| Description Jenny Browne delivers a world At Once, in which things happen abundantly. From the opening poem, “For the Morning,” from which the book’s title is drawn, through the very last line “but I didn’t want / to stop here,” At Once portrays both the far-flung and the intimate. With concerns that range from the sudden demise of a morning glory to gymnastics on a train across Kansas, from the death penalty in Texas to Tibetan sky burials, from the excess wedding gifts to the shelf life of mayonnaise, these poems are grounded in the human, in the bloom and wither of daily life with all its surprise, mystery, and disappointment. Through leaps in language, image, and perception, At Once energetically reminds us that in this world of amazing flux and juxtaposition, what happens, matters. As children in a first grade class remind their poetry teacher, pumping their folded hands in the air: yes, a heart loves and loses and waits and wonders, but in the end what a heart, like time itself, does best “is somehow / keep itself beating like this, Miss. / Mine goes like this.” Reviews “Jenny Browne manages to combine sublime feasts with great fragility to produce work that celebrates the knowingness of heart and bone, skin and soul. Throughout At Once, it¹s 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
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Glass Poetry chapbook by Jenny Browne Pecan Grove Press, 2000 ISBN-10: 1877603694 ISBN-13: 978-1877603693 48 pages, 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
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