The reviews are in… (a few very nice ones anyways).

from Publisher’s Weekly:

Warmer and more welcoming than many other poets with such fierce intelligence, Browne (The Second Reason), in this third outing, keeps on finding wry and empathetic ways to let us see what she sees. Her free verse and prose blocks can speculate about human motives in general (“what something is worth/ depends not on what it’s made of// but what lives next door”) or set scenes, as in “Indiana Elegy,” where “women drink/ martinis from baby food jars/ and smile without showing their teeth.” Browne can turn dry, almost taciturn, in local ironies (“According to the survey/ we say/ we are/ happy”), though she is just as comfortable as an enthusiastic traveler; one poem relies on white space, stopping short, and the next on accumulated detail. Browne remains a poet of the American Midwest, where she grew up, a poet of Texas, a world citizen alert to injustice, a feminist, and a mother, at home citing Adrienne Rich. But where much of her last collection looked at parenthood, this one saves its energies for commemoration. Grandparents, her father (a doctor), her brother-in-law, and others get addressed in care and sadness, as towns and people from Browne’s childhood reveal their kindness and their self-destruction. The poet’s demotic American words and her sophisticated sentences together build up, then rip down, then rebuild her adult world, where “the best parts eventually/ point across the table at the worst, as the hook lip/ of the big dipper points towards the north star.” (Feb.)

and from Camille Dungy in The Rumpus:

I got lost in these poems. I mean that as a compliment. I would read along and find myself traveling a different stream than the poem’s beginning led me to believe I would travel, and I did not mind the surprises. In fact, I relished them. This is a rich book of intense subject matter. There are stories of a life, yes, but they are not treated as anecdotes, little quips with no resonance. The power of these poems comes from the attention Browne pays to resonance. From the very first poem, “The Multiple States of Matter,” I suspected Dear Stranger would be a wonderful book. By this, I mean I predicated the book would be full of wonder. And, dear stranger, it has proven to be so.