Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists

It’s everybody’s biography, always “not yet begun," as well as the list of directions, questions, and observations for provoking an investigation into the interior of a life keenly attentive to the resonance of other lives. The reader recognizes herself as the I, the you, the character in a novel, someone missing, someone alive again— illuminated, self-conscious, caught in the act. Like CD Wright, whose work inspires the title, Laynie Browne is hilarious at a slant, provocative, and touching. Her language, which makes everything happen, has an incomparably swervy brilliance.
Forrest Gander

Though the poems are awash in the quotidian—buying gifts, planning travel, filling out forms, child care—they read like the textual record of a sensitive mind working through the “thoughts surrounding” the daily demands that make up a life. Such thinking, for Browne, is tinged with an acute awareness of our inevitable mortality.
Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

The experience of reading Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists was not unlike how Tender Buttons made me feel the first time I read it, or how Hejinian’s My Life makes me feel when I reread it. A sort of stuttering, obfuscated autobiographical narrative establishes itself in fits and starts as one makes one’s way through Translation, but I’d be hard pressed to summarize it. Nor would I want to; Translation is a marvelous book that is better experienced.
Kevin O'Rourke, Michigan Quarterly Review