introduction 17ity of daily life in her collection Daily Sonnets ( 2007 ).^32 In Browne’s
words, her 150 poems approach ‘all mental states, traps, games and
assemblages... My sonnets are an approachable unruly gathering.
What the poems have in common is that they practice permeabil-
ity’ (p. 158 ). As a busy mother of two, the warping of the fourteen-
lined cell provides liberation in the mapping out of duration and
the everyday. Her titles alone suggest this fracturing of the sonnet
form: ‘Half Sonnet + 1 ’, ‘Two fourteenths Sonnet’, and ‘After-
Shower Sonnet’. The world of the kindergarten humorously
informs the making of the poetry, as with the mode of questioning
in Sonnet 25 : ‘Why do I require these sudden / Tablets of con-
centration / She made poetry sound like a playdate / Squeezing
her wrought hands’ (p. 25 ). Brown offers a comic translation of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 , in which ‘Let me not to the marriage of
true minds’ becomes a refracted and sonorous equivocation: ‘Let
me not to the marrow of truant minds / Admit the impenetrable.
Lozenge is no lounge / Which alternates when it altercation fi nds’
(p. 119 ). Browne adds in her afterward to the book that ‘I think
of the modern sonnet as an increment of time within a frame.
Something that often physically fi ts into a little rectangle (but not
in thought)... this book is an invitation’ (p. 159 ). Far from extol-
ling the sonnet form as a display of technical virtuosity, Browne
emphasises the responsiveness of form to the pressures of daily life.
Her volume illustrates how contemporary versions of the sonnet
enable surprising freedoms of expression and performance.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Jahan Ramazani highlights ‘The spread of English worldwide to
its use by nearly a third of the world’s population’ and he crucially
reminds his readers that this dissemination is ‘rooted in the might
of the British Empire and has been perpetuated by the military and
economic power of the United States’.^33 Considering the future of
English literary studies, Ramazani proposes:
Literary criticism on English and other imperial-language
literatures must co-exist with studies of writing in local and