Amazonaholic: Celebrating Life’s Irony with Sommer Browning

Either Way I’m Celebrating is Sommer Browning’s first book of poetry and is an entertaining and intriguing read. Her experimentation and wit is a thrill to read, I actually feel like I am sitting in the audience of one of her stand up comedy shows. It literally made me laugh out loud! Her poetry is much like her stand up comedy, as she writes and draws the ironic capabilities of the world. The comics are a hilarious break from some of her more serious poems and keep me interested throughout the entire book. She mixes the reality of the mundane world with a “surreal biting wit” that is reflected in her comic relief. The title also implies her recognition of life and the real world through a progression of adolescence into adulthood. She breaks the convention of most contemporary poetry by mixing lyrical poetry and prose with hand drawn comics, evoking a sense satire and beauty in the world.

 Sommer’s book is full of intense imagery, she reflects on the irony of the world through her eyes. She rebels against what society accepts and deems as normal by merely laughing at it. She has a witty tone toward it in her poem “Breed”, as she comments on the pressures put on her to settle down and have children because she’s aging. She says, “Nothing will happen/we tell the sun,/if it does,/watch me catch it.” This sense of humor is a large theme within her book. In “When Christopher Died and I Didn’t Believe It”, she lists off the people in her life who have died and how they all relate. She draws connections that are inspiring as they come to a whole or a larger meaning (although this one I did not grasp). Sommer also does this as she moves from scenes of adolescence to adulthood and the effect that aging has on her. In her series of “House” poems, she connects her childhood and growing up to the house she did it all in. The house is a representation for the people within it who change; while it, like the world, remains the same. She deconstructs the symbol of the house with poems like “In a Bedroom” and “The Housesitter”.

 It seems as though Sommer is trying to accept the meagerness of the world as she creates her own celebration around it, making it a more exciting and beautiful place of existence for herself. She has this carefree attitude of “why complain, when you can just laugh at it?” which is inspiring to me as a poet because there are many risks involved in this perspective that she transfers into poetry successfully. I trust in the speaker because she is open with the reader and doesn’t shy from her perspectives; rather she brings these perspectives to life with her various images. Either Way I’m Celebrating is a heterogeneous mixture of things, including comic relief in her drawings, the seriousness and ambiguity in some of her content, the variety of forms, ironic one liners, and also more clear and simple poems that are riddled with images. Her connections of these things are very clear in each section, as she continues it much like a narrative. The book is a celebration in itself because it rejects normative behavior in poetry.