American Crow
by Jennifer Browne
The poems in American Crow are hauntingly wise and true, funny and heart-wrenching all at once. In this brilliant, deeply researched, deeply personal work, Jennifer Browne maps the mysterious, hollow, and hidden spaces beneath worlds that seem, on the surface, both certain and solid.
These poems are filled with what lies beneath--coiled copperheads, a nest of abandoned baby rabbits, the armored bodies of crabs burrowing in the sand at Assateague, and the speaker’s feelings of estrangement and loss and the need for triage “for a something, a wound that I can’t see.”
This is a book about the limits of human perceptions and senses. It’s a book about deep grief and hereditary suffering. But these poems play hard, too. Here we find the story of Maeve, the legendary Irish warrior who was killed with a piece of hard cheese; we visit the burial place of Stonewall Jackson’s arm; we learn the history of the banana, delve into “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” and finally, heartbreakingly, hopefully, visit the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., where a bonsai tree that survived Hiroshima still flourishes. It’s said that crows bring gifts to humans who show them kindness. Jennifer Browne’s “American Crow” is such a gift. How lucky we are to receive it.
—Lori Jakiela
In American Crow, Jennifer Browne has crafted a formidable and fascinating sequence of work that deftly navigates land mines, lifelines, history, reverence, harm and mystery while excavating meaning from the blood and bones of a people. Browne has an observational acuity and way with language that makes me want to return and return to her work. If I could only re-read one book this year, I would make it American Crow.
—John Burroughs, 2022-2023 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate
Jennifer Browne’s quirky American Crow seems magically spun from the delicacy and robustness of a ceaselessly inquiring mind that shies away from nothing. There is longing here and marvel, tenderness and loss. There are sand crabs and sycamores, old photographs and yews, all of them embodied in language both sensuous and precise. Browne is no sentimentalist; in most of these pieces she has exposed an ache and makes no promise of redemption, which is why her book reminds us that underneath our ordinary comings and goings, we know, we remember what it is to feel truly alive. What a gift.
—Barbara Hurd, The Epilogues