JUST LIVING

Browne (Zephyr, 2010, etc.) makes sense of an ending world in this new collection of poems, which won the 2019 Catamaran Poetry Prize.

Climate anxiety is a motif in the new book by Browne. In the first poem, “Augury,” she ruefully admits, “I can hardly believe we still have weather. / Today, this headline: / Places to Visit Before They Disappear. / Some billionaire will build a wall / around one of those doomed venues and sink / a dozen underground bunkers adorned / with gold and marble fixtures.” The despair over the changing world is in some ways an outward manifestation of the traumas in her own life, however: grief, strained relationships, failed loves. “We’d met in a bar in San Francisco—” she writes in a poem about a romantic encounter gone awry. “I was often in a bar in those days, / as if love lived there. // My father was an alcoholic / and my mother had just died, / and looking back at who I was then, // I realize I was crazy from grief.” The book is full of surreal imagery, humorous for the matter-of-fact manner in which Browne reports them but resonant nonetheless. In one poem, she walks past a man urinating on a Valentine’s Day window display. In another, she admits to shouting advice to a cocaine-addled character on the Netflix show Bloodlines. The tragicomic nature of loneliness is found in “Home,” a partial ode to an old basement apartment: “Occasionally, a sort of boyfriend sailed by / with wilted roses, the discount tag still glued // to the cellophane, in gratitude for the expensive / dinner I’d bought him because // he’d forgotten his wallet again, and because / I’d helped him realize he really did want to be // a monk.” Browne manages to communicate the rawness and vulnerability of life while never losing her surgical control of the language. The poems blow through the pages like passing storms, shocking the reader with their momentary intensity before disappearing on the wind. “Don’t worry,” she writes in a late and powerful poem, “the seizure of feeling / has passed, and I won’t mention autumn // or longing like the breeze lifting / the edges of the clouds and rolling them up // to disappear into infinity’s storage unit.” The reader reaches the end with a feeling of having survived a season of truly startling weather.

A memorable and affecting collection of addictively mournful lyrics.