Endocrinology: poetry

by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kiki Smith (Illustrator)

poetry & drawings in collaborative artists' book

Genres: Poetry, Art

28 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Chinese: 白萱华) is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is married to the painter Richard Tuttle, with whom she has frequently collaborated.

Reviews

[Jay Paine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within this hybrid landscape of collage, printmaking, and poetry, Berssenbrugge's philosophical, scientific, and spiritual understandings about the body surface in striking clarity.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biology well-learned, recalled in spare words, in five parts. The writing steps across the gap that makes one word "nature," and another "culture." Then it makes a kind of calculus of brief equations that sometimes seem to take place inside the soft crests of single body/its partner/its offspring. ("To make this whole, any object, brings ito being something not in nature, an interior measurement, yourself,/not yourself, burst of growth when you sleep." There is a tenderness; it is half "tenderness," and half shadow cast by a capillary. It is a time-lapse of love, and motherhood, and dance.

The technique is a measuring of microfunctions with words that shapeshift into science ("The place where a word originates in her body is the physical source of her sense of beauty,/so you can change the word for 'happiness' that was formerly, 'innocence.'"). There is something on the vague cusp of disease and disorder.

While this layering creates a kind of ecosystem of meaning, its segmentation also prevents it from gathering force. Words are set in italics, on blocks of white on a background of taupe, abrading to blue. Single words or phrases ("spinning on a pivot," "resignation," "glory") are handwritten among them, and seem to have oblique reference to the main text. Other areas are blank, like the negative space of a sunprint. There are anatomical prints: ovaries, femurs, vessels, etc.

"The bird watches the man and woman dance."

to

"He cannot separate from the loved person, to shed the loved body."

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous