Awards

• Commended for National Book Awards (Poetry) 2020
• Commended for Pulitzer Prize (Poetry) 2021

Overview

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars extends the intensely phenomenological poetics of “The Star Field” in Empathy, which appeared over thirty years ago. The book is structured as a continuous enfolding of poems, each made up of numbered serial parts, their presiding poetic consciousness moving from the desert arroyo of New Mexico to the white-tailed deer of Maine and between conversations with daughter, husband, friends, pets (corn snake and poodle), and a woman, or star-visitor, beneath a tree who calls “any spirit in matter … star-walking.” These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the channeling of daily experience, to gestalt and angel, dolphins and extraterrestrials. Here, family is a type of constellation and “thought is a form of organized light.” All our senses are activated by Berssenbrugge's light-absorbing lines, lines that map a geography of interconnected intelligence—interdimensional intelligence—that exists in all sentient objects and sustains us. This is not new age poetry but poetry for a new age, rigorous of thought and grounded in the physical world where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

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9780811229388

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Reviews

Every collection of poems by Berssenbrugge is a literary step forward...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 Berssenbrugge's lines-saturated with the hallucinatory speed of thought-have the urgency of a manifesto; she consistently calls attention to the interrelatedness 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

Every collection of poems by Berssenbrugge is a literary step forward...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 Berssenbrugge's lines-saturated with the hallucinatory speed of thought-have the urgency of a manifesto; she consistently calls attention to the interrelatedness 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 There is something hopeful about the vast compassion of Berssenbrugge's poetry and the living connections she gently illuminates between all things. -- Joanna Lee - Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Information

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Empathy, Nest, and I Love Artists. A Lit Cloud, her recent collaboration with the artist Kiki Smith, was published by Galerie Lelong in 2012. She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.

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