Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Poetry. Asian-American. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of the very few poets writing in the United States today whose voice and writing style are immediately recognizable. In her new collection, NEST, the medium of her poetry continues to be the sentence. To the formalities of syntax and grammar she adds the structures of domestic architecture, isolation, health, desire, play, and family life. Her writing offers a unique poetics of metaphysics and manners. As always the poetry is sensuous and stunning, and Richard Tuttle has once again designed an arresting cover.

Nest

What can one person know of another? These poems act as energy fields of images from science, philosophy, and romantic love. They evoke the spaces of the New Mexican desert, the Alaskan tundra, her Chinese home, and the interior self in relationships, as the poet makes empathy a metaphor for the space of one person inside another. The lines of verse are long, sensuous, and prose-like, following the open horizons of the West. "Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry moves from 'inner' phenomena to ones coming from the 'external' world and back again with breathtaking evenness. Calmly and convincingly she leads our attention from...confidence or passion or attention itself to ice crystals, gulls fireworks, or apple trees and to very specific qualities of perception, especially vision--most notably, those associated with the properties of light--fogginess, brightness, colors--(what a poet of light she is!)--in poetry that always speaks equally about 'the world' and 'herself.' She is neither 'objectivist' nor 'subjectivist' but a poet of the whole consciousness. A virtuoso of the long line, hers--unlike those of most other poets--are startlingly non-rhapsodic, although they are more truly emotional than those of most rhapsodists. I've known and loved Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry for years. It gets better all the time"--Jackson Mac Low.

Empathy

A selection from Berssenbrugge's work from the late 60s to the present. Nine different books and several completely new works are represented here.

New and Selected Poems

I Love Artists

A poet of “epic perception” and “subtle music,” Mei-mei Berssenbrugge opens form into long, shimmering lines of profound emotional intensity and multivalent voices, splintered with space, silence, and desert light. Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual's relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly,deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization — a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality “saturated with being” in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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