By Dion O’Reilly
Writers with an interest in the power of the poetic turn would do well to look at Susan Browne’s newest collection, Monster Mash (Four Way Books 2025). In this, her fourth book, Browne’s tone is confident, in full control of her spicy, wry pragmaticism. The reader is comfortably willing to stay with the narrator as she plays tennis, shops for clothes, or crashes a Ford Galaxie. But despite the seemingly pedestrian activities, this speaker’s thoughts and observations leap through time and space, following strands of thought into imaginary worlds exploring the veil between life and death, the known and the unknown, until finally, a little more is understood, or, if not understood, at least accepted.
Browne creates her many voltas through skillful manipulation of English linguistic modes, tenses, and literary devices. She repeatedly moves from indicative tense, which involves the known world, to a subjunctive world, which we might broadly define less as a grammatical form and more as the unseen world of desire and mystery. Furthermore, Browne frequently incorporates other modes: the imperative command form and the interrogative question mode. She sprinkles in dialogue, direct address, lists, and abrupt changes in verb tenses. Each of these shifts gracefully moves the reader into the poem’s insight.
For an example of how changes in mode conjure cognitive and poetic turns, let’s look at
“Love Letters,” a New Ohio Review poem that appears in the first section of Monster Mash, where many of the poems reference a kind of social and environmental degradation. In the first stanza, she is in an indicative reality, a brief narrative description that heightens experience by incorporating scintillating visual and aural elements, and also, with its resonant consonance, borders on the lyric. Note how the second stanza immediately moves out of narrative:
autumn leaves glitter in their brittling
someone plays the french horn on the shore
beneath the blue flame of sky the sound
like silver glinting across air like tinder
dear california
when I’m gone
will you still be here
will there still be a shore
someone stomps out of the reeds
holding a fishing pole
commands the horn player to stop
I walk by into silence
missing the music
wondering what else I want
on this hot november day
a cloud spilling rain
a voice that’s kind
not so many demands
not so many desires
I imagine mother earth is tired
our tumult & trash
our french horns & fishing poles
our eyelashes & elbows
our hands wanting to hold
dear humans
beautiful & dangerous
what will we do next
I keep thinking about love
about a man
who wrote to me years later
to say he was sorry for loving badly
he was a painter
& painted me standing in a field
of wheat wearing a yellow dress
& straw hat
like I was part of the land
the soft-gold dusk the wind
he sees me is what I thought
I was seen
& it felt like love
it didn’t last but what lasts
love lasts because here it is again
as I walk around the lake
we could have done better
we were learning are we learning
the water is low the color of slate
covered in crushed diamonds
the geese gliding
the hawk & falcon
the insects busy
building their empires
the snake undulating
across the road
disappearing I see you
dear vanishings
As noted, immediately after the indicative, descriptive narrative of the first stanza, the
poem moves to epistolic, direct address as she refers to California as “dear california.” Note how seamlessly the reader is taken on this little ride out of indicative reality into an imaginative longing. Direct address and its sister, apostrophe, conjures yearning as it speaks to an entity that is not present. By personifying California, Browne creates a wistful tone, and the reader is subtly asked to do the impossible, turn a territory into a being. We are moving into the subjunctive, the unreal, the hypothetical, but we don’t stay long; the interrogative mode is quickly invoked, as is the future tense:
. . . dear california
when I’m gone
will you still be here
will there still be a shore . . .
In the third stanza, we return to narrative, but dialogue and imperative are implied: “someone stomps out of the reeds/holding a fishing pole/commands the horn player to stop.” Then the speaker returns to a first person narrative. But there are many shifts, even within this snippet of narrative. By listing, she moves us into her bullet points of longing, moving the diction toward a subjunctive world that does not exist, the personal utopia.
. . . I walk by into silence
missing the music
wondering what else I want
on this hot november day
a cloud spilling rain
a voice that’s kind
not so many demands
not so many desires . . .
Then she again personifies the Earth with her subjunctive imaginings, followed by another list:
. . . I imagine mother earth is tired
our tumult & trash
our french horns & fishing poles
our eyelashes & elbows
our hands wanting to hold . . .
The speaker rapidly and seamlessly moves from narrative, to imperative, to a list, to
personification, then another list. The absence of punctuation facilitates the merging flux, the sinuous cognition. This speaker never stays in a mode for long; as a consequence, the reader is invited into dynamic thinking, unlike the monotony of depressive thinking, which is often trapped in its orbit. Even if this speaker’s thoughts are full of unfulfilled desire, the way these wishes are approached is through constant linguistic transformations and refreshed imaginings.
In the sixth stanza and following, the shifts and turns accelerate, starting with direct
address again: “dear humans,” and then a leap to a future tense, interrogative mode with “what will we do next.” Then she shifts tense again, moving far into the past as she remembers an ex-lover. Her descriptions of the past, lush and painterly, go on for several lines, and then a snippet of inner dialogue: “he sees me is what I thought.” The following lines leap back and forth at breakneck speed, not only between different temporalities, but also between exposition, lush description, questions, and lists:
. . . I was seen
& it felt like love
it didn’t last but what lasts
love lasts because here it is again
as I walk around the lake
we could have done better
we were learning are we learning
the water is low the color of slate
covered in crushed diamonds
the geese gliding
the hawk & falcon
the insects busy
building their empires
the snake undulating
across the road
disappearing . . .
The poem ends in an affectionate direct address to a subjunctive world. As the recipient
of a letter, it certainly is not a real world—it’s a mysterious world, a world that has been, but is no more, a world on its way out, a world that is pure change, fragmented, shattered, transformed and transforming—and all of it, whatever it is, is both respected, loved, and accepted: “I see you / dear vanishings.”
Of course it takes more than a change in mode or tense to turn a poem toward its
discovery. But certainly, one way to help a shy poem reveal its insight is to deploy a variety of linguistic tools as we attempt to lift the veil. As Seamus Heaney said, “the English language / belongs to us . . .” and Browne seems to be acutely aware of that as she effortlessly leaps through modes and tenses as, bit by bit, a small moment of presence and acceptance, even love, is achieved, which, in all this vanishing, might be the closest we get to hope.
Dion O’Reilly‘s third book, Limerence, was a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition for Washington State Poets and is now available from Floating Bridge Press. She is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize and Ghost Dogs, winner of The Independent Press Award for Poetry, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award, and runner-up for the Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, and Rattle. She is a podcaster, leads poetry workshops, and is starting a new journal about lyric moments and the altered mind. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
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