Given her favorite subjects—politics, pregnancy, parenthood, child language acquisition, city life and city planning, girls’ and women’s basketball—I might well admire Jenny Browne’s poetry even were her phrasings less fluid, her transitions less surprising, her lines less varied than they are. Poets find their first readers for many reasons. They last, though, only when—like Browne—they do memorable things with words.

Though it all sounds contemporary, demotic, American, Browne’s work catches an unusual formal variety within her spoken voice. Here are page-long stichic exclamations just this side of performance poetry; numbered sets of laconic observations; stanzas thin and bright as mica chips; poems shaped, and poems unshapely; sentences slowly sprawling and sentences anxiously clipped; and a poker hand’s worth of prose poems, some staccato, some legato. Memories of teen anxieties are, in one prose poem named for a first teen crush, “hang-ups and hang-nails knotted into a hair shirt to wear on the can’t take it back tightrope, little failures squirreled cozy and deep.” (Publishers should—this one didn’t—print prose poems both right- and left-justified: not Browne’s fault.) In one poem of childhood memories, fluid associations, and lengthy clauses, a visit to an elementary school class brings back “the feeling of being… small and learning / how to spell February and lightning.” In a poem of short takes, adult life, and quiet wisdom, “Marriage” is “the sign you tape to the trees: / please be careful with me.”

Browne excels by switching between modes—dreamt and waking, associative and memoiristic—not only among her poems, but within them: a poem set during her pregnancy declares “that blood is the sister of green,” then asks “why / all the parades are followed by women / with brooms.” A poem about motherhood highlights the transition from dream-logic to reported events by using parallel constructions: “If you’re not with us, you’re dew. / If you’re dew, you disappear. // If you’re me this week, you see / a baby learn she has hands.” She can recall the Irish poet Medbh McGuckian (and, perhaps, American peers such as Larissa Szporluk) in her quiet layers of slippery non sequiturs: “The day makes a map of disappearing / and the ants need a bridge / for carrying crumbs twice their size.” Yet Browne can also suggest smart, hip “mainstream” fiction (e.g. Alice Mattison), in the concision of her alert realism: a side street in summer, a gym, Galveston Bay.

Set beside contemporaries...