This week on The Poetry Shop 5, we welcome Jenny Browne, author of I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, forthcoming from BOA Editions (September 15, 2026); as well as Dear Stranger, The Second Reason, and At Once (University of Tampa Press).
You might know Browne's work from The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, and other esteemed journals. Once the Poet Laureate of Texas (2017), she currently splits her time between Texas, and Northern Ireland, as a Professor of English at Trinity University and Queens University.
I Am Trying to Love the Whole World grapples with tragedy, illness, mourning, and attempts to find moments of transcendence, joy and meaning. Browne finds ways to love the world while reciting birds in alphabetical order in "But You Can't Keep Everything" (hear it on The Slowdown), making DIY waffles at a breakfast buffet in "& So I Try Writing Another Unreasonable Elegy", and in a refrain of tumbleweeds in "The Way We Loved Those Desert Towns" (read it on The Illanot Review).
Here, music also offers reprieve in nods to Verdi, Emmylou Harris, Dvořák, even America's Got Talent. Of these, I found "Late Fermata" particularly moving, in which a woman in her final days is wheeled outside to enjoy a nap in a La-Z-Boy. There, paused on a final note, she earns a kind of halo. (You can read “Late Fermata” on Poets.org and hear Browne read it.)
We’re grateful to have Jenny Browne join us on The Poetry Shop 5 to share some of the poetry books that have inspired her over the years.
Welcome to the Poetry Shop 5, Jenny Browne! Tell us about your new book.
My fifth collection, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, will be released from BOA Editions. The title of the collection is also the first line of a dozen or so poems in the book, a result of an assignment/constraint I gave myself during a particularly hard spell of leavings and losses when I was really struggling to read or write. So in a fit of desperation and hope, I decided to begin each day with that one line, and see what happened next. (To read more about I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, check out Browne’s interview on The Rumpus).
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem inspired you to write?
One of the first poets that made me want to write, or perhaps more just to think I might like how poetry thinks, was Pablo Neruda's Libro de las Preguntas / The Book of Questions. This was actually in an intro Spanish class in college rather than a poetry class. And I still speak approximately 6th grade Spanish maybe because I quickly got much more interested in the way Neruda's paradoxical questions made my brain and body feel. Were they poems or word problems or snapshots of consciousness? I still don't know. But they felt true to the way the language inside a poem says more than it says. I was hooked.
Which poetry book are you currently reading?
I am currently reading Richard Siken's I Do Know Some Things. I picked up Siken's new book, which I had already heard great things about, after listening to him on The New Yorker poetry podcast, which I also recommend. In the episode he spoke of what it might mean to have to tell the truth in this book. Of course he has told different sorts of truths in figures and fables in other books, but something about reading this book right now, prose poems and childhood and recovering from a stroke and about re-learning words, wholly stripped down of artifice, and maybe especially in a time when you're less sure than ever that you're talking to an actual human felt galvanizing and necessary and intimate all at once. It's a wonder.
Is there a book on the craft of writing that you recommend to poets?
A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass. Well, it's certainly not little, despite the title, but you get to live inside the poet brain of Robert Hass for nearly 500 pages which is a lucky thing, and it has become a book I return to again and again, not for exercises or prompts or anything like that but for the way it engages with the ways poems take and unmake shapes with deep knowledge and precision as well as humor and curiosity.
Who is a new voice in poetry that we need to check out–someone with a debut book or recent release?
Laurie Ann Guerrero - REDWORK. My sister San Antonio poet Laurie Ann Guerrero is not a new voice, but I've been reading the poems in her new book, forthcoming from Autumn House Press in 2026 for a few years now and I'm really excited about this book which includes lyric fragments, embroidery and poems that explore and explode notions of women's work.
Finally, what’s a poetry book that others may not know about but deserves a shout out?
The fantastic, funny and wholly original Northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn has just released a Selected Poems volume with Carcanet Press. Nobody writes like Leontia Flynn, striking and spare and sonic and funny as hell. Everyone should read her.
Books referenced in this article.
I Am Trying to Love the Whole World (BOA Editions) by Jenny Browne
Libro de las Preguntas / The Book of Questions (Copper Canyon Press) by Pablo Neruda
I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press) by Richard Siken
A Little Book on Form (Ecco Press) by Robert Hass
REDWORK (Autumn House Press) by Laurie Ann Guerrero
Selected Poems (Carcanet Press) by Leontia Flynn