Empathy
Publisher: Barrytown/Station Hill Press, Inc.
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.
About Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
ei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in 1947 in China. She attended Barnard College for a year before transferring to Reed College, where she earned her B.A. in 1969, followed by an M.F.A from Columbia University in 1973. Berssenbrugge is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and Concordance (Kelsey St. Press, 2006), a collaboration with the sculptor Kiki Smith. Her other collections include Nest (2003); The Four Year Old Girl (1998);Endocrinology (1997), a collaboration with Kiki Smith; Sphericity (1993); Empathy (1989); and The Heat Bird (1983). Berssenbrugge is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two American Book Awards, and honors from the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Western States Art Foundation. She has been a contributing editor of Conjunctions Magazine since 1978 and has taught at Brown University. She lives in New Mexico and New York City with her husband, the sculptor Richard Tuttle, and their daughter.
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