I Am Trying to Love the Whole World

In her lyrical fifth collection, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, Jenny Browne fearlessly holds 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.”

Praise for 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

The Way We Loved Those Desert Towns

I am trying to love the whole world
the way we loved those desert towns
passed through without imagining
who else we might have been
or broken. The sound ways
of finding water long forgotten
save a dry hump of thunder
there beyond the orchard
where the lush pecans drop.
Let’s make a spell for the return trip,
whisper   bonefire    easysad    foreverever.
Sometimes the past best stay
a distant persistent ringing.
Sometimes a country song
about starting over drifts from
inside the rusting sky blue
Mustang paused on the shoulder.
If you can imagine passing someone
on this road, you might also imagine
sitting next to it all day then all night
trying to tell the difference
between the ones who would feed you
& the ones who will eat you.
Pecos wind keeps reaping dust
for the last grand Ceiba
not here to save. Tumbleweeds
make such fine refrain.