The Second Reason

Jenny Browne jump-cuts, seamlessly, between the heart and the mind as she addresses issues of the human condition. although the situations are familiar reverie of youth, beginnings of a family as an adult, love between a husband and wife the voice is singular, strident and illuminating. When she asks, Do you want the short or the long version? the answer is always both, if it's in her voice. This work is important not only because it teaches courage in our daily lives, but it also teaches a special way of being afraid./ This is the end of every day/ when we peer from the bushes/ into the glowing kitchen of our own life. . . . --A. Van Jordan

The Second Reason is wild and beautiful and surprising. In this poet's hands the seemingly mundane is transformed into the nearly sacred, the elemental reveals its inner mysteries, and scraps of overheard language dissolve into a song. Jenny Browne is a poet of alchemy, and these poems embody wonder. --Nick Flynn

What charm and beauty, what observational skill, what originality, what panache we find in Jenny Browne's The Second Reason. These poems are laced with danger, the knives on the wall are lined up by size she warns in one poem, and humor, put your hand in the air if you've heard / the one about the hokey pokey man, she directs in another. Browne deftly moves from prose poem to found poem to haunting and terse lyrics grounded in a strange landscape: poems about children and childbirth with the backdrop of terrorism and 9/11. As she writes with characteristic off-center understatement: In my country orange means/everyone should be a little more/ afraid than usual. This is a volume that should not be missed. --Beth Ann Fennelly

In her new collection of poems, The Second Reason, Jenny Browne emerges as a poet of tremendous depth and range. The poems here approach both the details of the domestic life and the strangeness of consciousness with equal attention. The work is musical, spiritual, and physical, the poet serving as an observant linguistic and sensual guide to all the things that matter: love, suffering, and pleasure with her precise and inventive lines. There is a surprising calm in the wild leaps this poetry makes, as if the poet is at home with the unpredictable and intent upon bringing us there with her. --Laura Kasischke