Susan Browne (Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry judged by Edward Hirsch) has crafted her fourth collection of poetry into an incendiary inventory of life’s urgency and vitality in this late-stage capitalist moment. In “Air Quality Index: 500,” while Browne “[wonders] what the government [is] doing during this era of cannibalism,” “a bald eagle [flies] by with its head on fire.” Monster Mash explores the surreal lyricism of this phenomenon—when what sounds like hyperbolic symbolism is actually just the news. Even if the national bird aflame makes a fitting metaphor for the state of our body politic, it also transcribes a true emergency in the poet’s direct sight—wilderness and civilization smoldering alike in the California wildfires. Amid the existential scale of climate and economic crises, Browne’s poems deftly illuminate how we must also navigate the daily necessities of our individual lives: tending to aging parents, grieving those who pass before us, “[waking] to the river of air conditioner noise,” “cleaning the litter box / or driving around the locked-down town, / looking for a house [you] can’t afford or a job that doesn’t exist.” In the words of Dorianne Laux, “Browne’s poems are songs to the suffering earth, to love in the face of the pitiless moon, merciless angels, [and] to the past and the future.” After all, Browne reminds us, not all of our wandering is aimless. The speaker at the wheel “wants to show you what’s still possible / out by the river, the egret & geese, / the fast-moving current, that autumn is here / & there, there, there / are dark pools of coolness under the leaves.”
Susan Browne is the author of three previous poetry collections: Buddha’s Dogs, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize; Zephyr, winner of Steel Toe Books Editor’s Choice award; and Just Living, winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize. Other awards include The James Dickey Poetry Prize, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival Prize, and a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Northern California.
