In her introduction to Jenny Browne’s
New and Selected Poems
, Naomi Shihab Nye writes, “The poems are switchboards of care extending in so many directions, beamed up to high, but always with the subtlety of idiosyncratic awareness—it’s fascinating to fathom how she gets from one place to another. A startle, a dazzle of impulses enlivening the spirit . . . .” Browne’s poems ask personal questions:
How did we get here? Where are we going? Can we walk there together?
From love letters to strangers to extended meditations on slow-moving rivers, these poems surprise in their fidelity to the strangeness of being alive. In the new poems included here, this heightened awareness is set against the landscape of a planet undergoing global climate change, quickly becoming inhospitable. Resisting the poles of paralysis and apocalypse, Browne travels through extreme and unfamiliar landscapes, considering the unthinkable, negotiating the past, and ultimately reimagining the future and our human place in it.