I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
Hardcover
$35.00
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BOA Editions
I Am Trying to Love the Whole World
$35.00
Sale price
$35.00
Regular price
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In her lyrical fifth collection, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, Jenny Browne fearlessly confronts grief without sentimentality and beauty without denial. For nearly a year, Browne began each poem with the line "I am trying to love the whole world," letting it guide her through loss, love, and survival. The result is a striking meditation on human fragility and the sustaining power of art, even as life--and the world around us--can be made and unmade in an instant.
Moving between tenderness, fierceness, and wry humor, these poems mourn a beloved friend, witness the pandemic, and reflect on the politicization of women's bodies. Browne delights in a snarky daughter scrolling TikTok, a ghost wearing her best red boots, and the music of Violetta's aria in La Traviata. Drawing on nature, memory, and human connection, she explores oceans, bones, motherhood, and time itself.
Multivocal, incantatory, and precise, her work asks what it means to live with loss while remaining open to the world, finding solace in the everyday--"sky blue / Mustang paused on the shoulder."
Book Details
- Publisher:
- BOA Editions
- ISBN:
- 9781968507237
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Pages:
- 92
- Authors:
- Jenny Browne
- Published Date:
- 2026-09-15
- Language:
- English
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About Jenny Browne
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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.)