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.
" In following and deepening into stars, Berssenbrugge turns to
light, to sound, to presence, to the relation between space-time
and (terrestrial) nature, in such a way that brings the stars to us
and then suspends us with them rather than launching into a
familiar portrait of the cosmos. There is also a spirituality here,
a belief in connectedness, which in another poet’s hands might
trace a more generic pattern. The crackling charge of
Berssenbrugge’s language holds us. Finalist for the PEN Open Book
Award "
*AGNI*
"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*
"This book finds Berssenbrugge lovingly absorbed in the field of
astronomy in all its possible aspects—abstractly, linguistically,
but especially in terms of the possibilities that it offers."
*Poetry Magazine*
"Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry explores the permeable boundaries
between the human and the natural worlds, as she makes palpable her
communion with birds, plants, dolphins, stars, and the beyond.
Emerging from the ferment of the Basement Workshop, a
collective of Asian-American poets, artists, and activists in the
1970s, Berssenbrugge went on to create a visionary ecopoetics that
directly confronts our planetary—and human—crisis. With her
preternaturally long lines, Berssenbrugge composes a syntax of
unfolding vistas, stretching our senses of both the plausible and
the possible, bringing new modes of affinity and new paths for
freedom into view. Berssenbrugge’s entanglements of consciousness
and perception have created a lyric that moves away from
self-centeredness toward the cosmos. A Treatise on
Stars is a far-out star flight—profoundly meditative,
extravagant, disarming, open. ‘Any soul may distribute itself into
a human, a toy poodle, bacteria, an etheric, or quartz crystal.’ As
readers we are, again and again, enthralled by her radical wagers
on poems enacting transformation. ‘Writing,’ the poet tells us,
‘can shift the mechanism of time by changing the record, then
changing the event.’"
*Bollingen Prize judges citation*
"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*
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