Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her styleits delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (New California Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, 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.

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (New California Poetry) (Volume 18)

HILLMAN, Brenda

Hass, Robert

Bedient, Calvin

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

Hello, the Roses

Poetry

New Directions

A Treatise on Stars&nbsp;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 typeof 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."

A Treatise on Stars

The groundbreaking poetic work by our “Mondrian in verse” (Susan Barba, Boston Review), now back in print in a newly revised edition with a new preface by the author.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.

Empathy

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

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.

Station Hill Press

Summits Move with the Tide

Greenfield Review Press

Random Possession

Business & Money

Economics

Reed Cannon & Johnson Pub

The heat bird

Burning Deck

The Heat Bird

Burning Deck Books

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