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

American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge makes her New Directions debut with this breathtaking new collection

Hello, the Roses

Poetry by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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.

Paperback(published Apr, 24 2013)

ISBN
9780811220910
Price US
16.95
Price CN
18
Page Count
112
Portrait of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Chinese-born American poet

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)