Longtime friends and poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Jenny Browne come together to celebrate their new collections, Sidekick and I Am Trying to Love the Whole World.

Thursday, October 8 · First Light Books · Doors 6:00 PM · Conversation 6:30 PM

Join us for an evening with poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Jenny Browne, longtime friends who come together to celebrate the release of their new collections, Sidekick and I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, both published by BOA Editions. Rather than an interview, expect a candid and warm conversation that happens between two poets who know each other well. Audience Q&A and a signing will follow.

SIDEKICK: Poems
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Written by internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Sidekick stands as a testament to poetry's enduring power to bear witness. With each poem, Nye affirms a truth that feels more urgent than ever: every human being deserves safety, dignity, and peace.

Drawing on her family's deep roots in Palestine, Nye writes with both abiding love and immeasurable heartbreak, offering intimate reflections that illuminate the human cost of conflict. Long a champion of dialogue across borders and divides, she crafts poems that are direct, conversational, and unafraid to confront the systems and structures that perpetuate harm.

Through her signature blend of candor, lyrical grace, and careful attention to everyday lives, Nye offers a collection that urges readers to look more closely, feel more deeply, and imagine a world in which we refuse to turn away from one another.

"On every page, Shihab Nye's insistent call is the same: people, all people, deserve to live safe and healthy lives, free from fear and violence. She mourns, rages, takes politicians to task, but always lands on the side of compassion." —Shelf Awareness

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About the author: Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including five collections of poetry from Boa Editions: Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), Transfer (2011), and The Tiny Journalist (2019). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Nye has received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Texas Writer Award 2024, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle.

I AM TRYING TO LOVE THE WHOLE WORLD: Poems

In her lyrical fifth collection, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, Jenny Browne fearlessly confronts grief without sentimentality and beauty without denial. For nearly a year, Browne began each poem with the line "I am trying to love the whole world," letting it guide her through loss, love, and survival. The result is a striking meditation on human fragility and the sustaining power of art, even as life—and the world around us—can be made and unmade in an instant.

Moving between tenderness, fierceness, and wry humor, these poems mourn a beloved friend, witness the pandemic, and reflect on the politicization of women's bodies. Browne delights in a snarky daughter scrolling TikTok, a ghost wearing her best red boots, and the music of Violetta's aria in La Traviata. Drawing on nature, memory, and human connection, she explores oceans, bones, motherhood, and time itself.

Multivocal, incantatory, and precise, her work asks what it means to live with loss while remaining open to the world, finding solace in the everyday.

"All elegies find ways of asking if the choices we have made as humans are sorely deluded or just bearable enough... Jenny Browne's work is fierce and tender all at once." —Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing

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About the author: Jenny Browne

Jenny Browne is the author of five collections of poetry, including Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2019). She served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She divides her time between San Antonio, Texas and Belfast, Northern Ireland.​

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