I Am Trying to Love the Whole World

“This is a book of grappling after grace, of incantations and linguistic veers, of refutations of easy solace and ‘trying to praise what left us gutted.’ Jenny Browne’s work is fierce and tender all at once, and these poems brim with both loss and beauty as they bear down brilliantly on grief and the forever-failable human heart. This is a book to be awed by and to return to again and again.” —Matt Donovan, author of The Dug Up Gun Museum

“All elegies find ways of asking if the choices we have made as humans are sorely deluded or just bearable enough. The poems in Jenny Browne’s I Am Trying to Love the Whole World startle and shift us because they speak to this difficulty of imaginative survival in a manner that feels openly associative, multivocal, and fierce.” —Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing

“Like Emily getting up early to compose verses, like Tennyson mourning Arthur Hallam inordinately, or like someone accidentally telling the truth, we learn here that if you stare at any word long enough it burns. To compose, we learn, is to arrange unequal things, like your laugh and an ambulance, like a thin cardigan of sun, like the varicose afternoons of the horizon herself, like the pained vulva of Killary Harbour.” —Medbh McGuckian, author of The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems

Jenny Browne is the author of five collections of poetry, including Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2019). She served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She divides her time between San Antonio, Texas and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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