I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems

by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman (Editor), Calvin Bedient (Editor), Robert Hass (Editor), Forrest Gander (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520246027
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/10/2006
Series:	New California Poetry , #18
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	154
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and lives in New Mexico. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Nest, The Four Year Old Girl, and Empathy.

Table of Contents

From Summits Move with the Tide
From Random Possession
From The Heat Bird
From Empathy
From Sphericity
From Endocrinology
From Four Year Old Girl
From Nest
New Poems

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

Essentially these poems are demanding. They demand that the reader give up preconceptions and enter their construct. What they return is a poetic view that is more than thinking outside the box but in a universe where there is not box—but language, reflection, and ultimately beauty instead.

Santa Fe New Mexican

Over the past quarter century, Berssenbrugge has released her work solely in small press editions, many of which are now out of print. This collection serves as a worthy introduction to her elegant oeuvre, but does not take the place of a collection, particularly because Berssenbrugge tends to work long, and some of what is here is excerpted. There are nine poems total from her first three books, of which the 10-part "The Heat Bird," from the book of the same title (1983), serves as a kind of turning point into Berssenbrugge's first major work, Empathy (1989), half of which is reprinted here. Berssenbrugge writes what might be called proofs, working sensuously off the language of science to find the divides between elements over which one has control and those over which one does not, "a constant notation of parallel streams of thought and observation." Though all three are represented, excerpts from two of her Kelsey Street Editions releases, Four Year Old Girl (1998) and Nest (2003), should send readers to those beautifully produced volumes. The four new poems are the book's weakest, but seem transitional. ("Even if a detail resists all significance or function, it's not useless, precisely," notes the title work.) If the book brings new readers to the last three titles listed above, it will have done its job. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly