Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge Livres

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, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new preface for this edition, "I believe we're born with the capacity for sensing emotional nuance around us. Not only of beloved persons nearby, but of people we don't know--globally--and also of animals, plants, clouds, rocks." In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element--water, fog--one place--tundra, desert mesa--one animal--the swan--as the locus of human illumination and desire. Jackson MacLow wrote that the poetry in this collection "moves from 'inner' phenomena to ones coming from the 'external' world and back again with breathtaking evenness" and that the poet herself "is neither 'objectivist' nor 'subjectivist' but a poet of the whole consciousness."

Drawing on four decades of work and also including other poems, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style - its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau)Winner of the Bollingen PrizeFinalist for the National Book AwardFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for PoetryFinalist for the PEN Open Book AwardFinalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize 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.”