Books
My fourth collection of poetry Monster Mash is here!
"I love this book’s brash diction, its reckless artfulness, and wicked humor, mechanisms of survival as the speaker contends with very real personal, family, and global traumas. “I put on my inferno mask / over my pandemic mask / & topped it off with my snorkel mask / against the river of cinders,” Susan Browne writes. “A swarm of locusts had dismantled my car.” There it is—the timing of a great comedian, and the devastation at the center of every magnificent joke. The result is a book of poems that captures, for me, what it feels like to exist in a culture and a world falling apart at the seams. “[W]hat can any of us do / to stop the butchers / because we have to be butchers / to stop them,” she writes, elucidating the conundrum of now so perfectly, I want to paint it on my bedroom ceiling, to be read while tossing and turning. I’ve come across few poems that get at the experience of embodiment quite like Browne’s description of “The mammogram room where I flop my boob / Onto the plastic tray. Flop is not exactly accurate / Concerning these tater tots.” It’s like sitting across the table from your best, most outrageous friend, cry-laughing at her inventive, raw aesthetic as she describes her first period, sitting on the toilet waiting for her mother to deliver “the white rowboat / I’d have to wear between my legs once a month / for the next 38 years,” or portraying herself as an “erotic locomotive / on a quest for the grail in the Valhalla of penises.” There is more to Monster Mash, much more. It tracks the span of a life, the early loss of a mother, and exposes the wisdom that comes to those who endure long enough to earn it, that “the intelligent thing is to offer everything / to infinite love." - Diane Seuss
"Susan Browne’s poems are songs to the suffering earth, to love in the face of the pitiless moon, merciless angels, to the past and the future, a mother’s death and what comes after, a father slipping slowly away, youth and aging, old loves and new. A whole life is stuffed into these pages, you can hear it breathing as you read." - Dorianne Laux
"In her canny and wonderfully approachable new poems, Susan Browne offers a worldview that is at times mournful, at times foreboding, but always grounded in tender and intimately rendered humanity. These are poems of place, as California’s fraught ecology and climate are front of mind, but they are also poems of time in which the speaker’s considerations of her own mortality and temporality offer us striking observation and poignant perspective throughout. Monster Mash is a gift rich with nostalgia, insight, and wisdom, and I am grateful for it."
- Jaswinder Bolina
My book is available at:
Amazon
Four Way Books
Bookshop.org
JUST LIVING
"To encounter these wise, witty, and vulnerable poems is to meet up with a woman who has navigated the variable waters of love, loss, cultural change, and an evolving selfhood, and has lived to tell the tale. From her conception “in a Motel Six in Henderson, Nevada, /down the road from an atomic bomb/testing site, during a chain-lightning storm” to the strange alienation of the TV at the gym as big as the house she grew up in, Browne’s lyric emerges from the “splendor” of “traveling through loneliness” without “curtains couches crock-pots.” These poems manage to be both harrowing and companionable. Susan Browne’s Just Living makes me feel more alive." -Diane Seuss
"I can hardly believe we still have weather./ Today, this headline:/ Places to Visit Before They Disappear.” These lines, from the opening poem of Susan Browne’s Just Living, provide the lens through which we read this timely, deeply moving book. Just Living confronts the precarious and, yes, absurd situation of living in a dying world. What’s odder than the idea of our own mortality, even the idea of extinction? Browne’s answer is a hard truth and a call to action: “What’s odder than that?/ Being alive. We must never be immune/ to each other.” -Maggie Smith
ZEPHYR
If I’m lucky,
I’ll have dinner tonight
surrounded by friends at the table,
our hands sculpting air,
trying to say how living feels.
Reviews of Zephyr:
Review by Michael Meyerhofer
Review by Carrie Moniz (Senior Editor of California Journal of Poetics)
"There you have it: the precise reason why I read poetry. Again and again Susan Browne’s poems sculpt the page and the air, telling us in ways both beautiful and funny how it feels to be alive in our strange selves in our strange, exuberant and entranced times. How can you resist someone who so freely admits, I’m not that good a person / and I know it’s true / because I don’t feel that bad about it”? Who wishes she were more spiritual, “but belief is like making your cat / wear a sweater”? I can think of few poets who mine so movingly that dark chasm between pathos and humor, which is where America seems to find itself these days." –George Bilgere
"Susan Browne’s Zephyr is an exuberant collection, as entertaining as it is heartfelt. If you think life on earth is absurd, meaningful, unbearably beautiful and downright awful all at once, you’ve found the right book. Browne is a witty and skillful chronicler of the “mortal ugh” in which “God is the pizza guy” and “you’re not thankful enough, / you don’t put your shoe on your head enough.” I for one am thankful that “this once world” now contains this fine second collection. I plan to try the shoe thing, too." –Kim Addonizio
“The poems in Susan Browne’s Zephyr are grounded in the mysteries of this terribly known, outrageously funny and sad world. With an expert sense of language and narrative, this intrepid poet cranks her highbeams to rummage “humanity’s basement, the murk inside the mammalian heart–” and unearths each dark, radiant truth.” –Dorianne Laux
Steel Toe Books
