I Am Trying to Love the Whole World - Hardcover

by Jenny Browne (Author)

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."

Author Biography

Jenny Browne the author of five collections of poetry, including Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2019). She served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She divides her time between San Antonio, Texas and Belfast, Northen Ireland.