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