There is something hopeful about the vast compassion of Berssenbrugge’s poetry and the living connections she gently illuminates between all things.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses; Empathy; and I Love Artists. Her collaborations include Endocrinology with Kiki Smith and Hiddenness with Richard Tuttle, as well as performances with Morita Dance Company, Blondell Cummings, and Davide Balula. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry for her lifetime contributions to American Poetry and the Mary McCarthy Award in recognition of engagement in the public sphere. She lives in northern New Mexico and New York City.

cover image of the book A Treatise on Stars

A Treatise on Stars

“My book describes how communicating with star beings can teach us to continue our world through love and grace, communal grace.” —Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “Chaco and Olivia”

A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime." Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

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cover image of the book Empathy

Empathy

“And now, illuminate the space and describe each one you saw in the mist.”—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “Fog”

Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world and its human relations, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new note for this edition, “I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition.” In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element (water, or fog), one place (tundra or desert mesa), one animal (the swan) as the locus of human illumination and desire.

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cover image of the book Hello, the Roses

Hello, the Roses

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses opens up poetic form into long, shimmering lines shaped by the beauty and phenomenal fullness of the natural environment. She begins by exploring an array of unities perceived between myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The poems of the middle section shift into an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist through a process of mutual healing and imagination. Images of her New Mexico mesa suffering drought become walks through forests and gardens, and flow into the concluding poems where the individual’s relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time form a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception bridging quartz and quantum bond. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly, deepening awareness, creating fields and nests, a rosette of civilization that reveals the embeddedness of all living things.

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There is something hopeful about the vast compassion of Berssenbrugge’s poetry and the living connections she gently illuminates between all things.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry explores the permeable boundaries between the human and the natural worlds, as she makes palpable her communion with birds, plants, dolphins, stars, and the beyond. Emerging from the ferment of the Basement Workshop, a collective of Asian-American poets, artists, and activists in the 1970s, Berssenbrugge went on to create a visionary ecopoetics that directly confronts our planetary—and human—crisis. With her preternaturally long lines, Berssenbrugge composes a syntax of unfolding vistas, stretching our senses of both the plausible and the possible, bringing new modes of affinity and new paths for freedom into view. Berssenbrugge’s entanglements of consciousness and perception have created a lyric that moves away from self-centeredness toward the cosmos. A Treatise on Stars is a far-out star flight—profoundly meditative, extravagant, disarming, open. ‘Any soul may distribute itself into a human, a toy poodle, bacteria, an etheric, or quartz crystal.’ As readers we are, again and again, enthralled by her radical wagers on poems enacting transformation. ‘Writing,’ the poet tells us, ‘can shift the mechanism of time by changing the record, then changing the event.’

Bollingen Prize judges citation

In following and deepening into stars, Berssenbrugge turns to light, to sound, to presence, to the relation between space-time and (terrestrial) nature, in such a way that brings the stars to us and then suspends us with them rather than launching into a familiar portrait of the cosmos. There is also a spirituality here, a belief in connectedness, which in another poet’s hands might trace a more generic pattern. The crackling charge of Berssenbrugge’s language holds us.

AGNI

This book finds Berssenbrugge lovingly absorbed in the field of astronomy in all its possible aspects—abstractly, linguistically, but especially in terms of the possibilities that it offers.

Poetry Magazine

A vibrant investigation into our faculties of perception.

Poetry Magazine

A vital hymn. Few living poets are as able to enter headlong into the spiritual state of our environment and its endangerment. Ethereal and metaphysical, Hello, the Roses presents one of the best minds in modern poetry.

Major Jackson, The New York Times

Every collection of poems by Berssenbrugge is a literary step forward. Hello, the Roses performs a quantum leap. The book is exhilarating. Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions churn. With her powerful command of words redoubled by a meditative patience, she captures a secret rhythm, into which she weaves lines that surprise us with their accuracy, their submission to experience.

Etel Adnan, Artforum (Best Books of 2013)

Every collection of poems by Berssenbrugge is a literary step forward. Hello, the Roses performs a quantum leap. The book is exhilarating. Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions churn. With her powerful command of words redoubled by a meditative patience, she captures a secret rhythm, into which she weaves lines that surprise us with their accuracy, their submission to experience.

Etel Adnan, Artforum

Berssenbrugge’s lines—saturated with the hallucinatory speed of thought— have the urgency of a manifesto; she consistently calls attention to the inter-relatedness of all things. Few living poets are as able to enter headlong into the spiritual state of our environment and its endangerment: one of the best minds in modern poetry.

Major Jackson, The New York Times

In Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Empathy, ‘the human hovers like a mood’ that refuses definition. In the flickering mirrors of distant landscapes, perception melts, like ice ‘glowing with light,’ into an intimate familiarity. These poems, with their startlingly detailed equivocations, and the scenes and sights they evoke, have become ‘spiritual exercises in physical form.’

Charles Bernstein

A dialogue of an extremely fine-tuned intelligence with the ‘world.’ We start out dazzled by the sheer beauty of the perceptions, the subtle music, the surprising shifts into complex inference and meditation. We end up ‘flattened against our seats’ gasping for breath as the poem takes off into unsuspected altitudes—or depths. Empathy is not just a fine book. It is an event. An important event.

Rosmarie Waldrop
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