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.”
