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Hello, the Roses
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 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.
- GenresPoetry21st Century
112 pages, Paperback
First published April 24, 2013
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About the author
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
39 books79 followersMei-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.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
September 20, 2017
There are lots of plants and different kinds of light in these poems.
I don't feel qualified to evaluate poems like this. Let me try. There are two kinds of words. With one kind, like 'crickets' or 'heartbeat', there's a thing that is definitely there, whether we like it or not, and so we attach a word to it so we can talk abut it. We don't really know what crickets are, but we need to talk about them, so we made up this word 'crickets'. The word is attaching itself to a real thing, and its failure (most words fail) comes from the fact that the true nature of the thing isn't very available to us.
With the other kind of word, there's a formal concept that exists in relation to other formal concepts, like 'subtract' or 'saturation' or 'presence'. These aren't real things; they're ways of manipulating other concepts. We have some very well-defined formal models, and they're built out of systems of words, and these are those words. They fail in that those formal models don't actually exist. But because they don't exist, a word like 'saturation' can be used in photography or cooking or physics.
With 'saturation' we build the system of words first and then try to shoehorn the things into them. With 'crickets' we see the things first and then try to cement a system of words to them.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's game (or one of them), unless I'm mistaken, is to treat the second kind of words as though they were the first. To talk about saturation or subtraction as though they were things we stumbled into and needed a word for.
I don't feel qualified to evaluate poems like this. Let me try. There are two kinds of words. With one kind, like 'crickets' or 'heartbeat', there's a thing that is definitely there, whether we like it or not, and so we attach a word to it so we can talk abut it. We don't really know what crickets are, but we need to talk about them, so we made up this word 'crickets'. The word is attaching itself to a real thing, and its failure (most words fail) comes from the fact that the true nature of the thing isn't very available to us.
With the other kind of word, there's a formal concept that exists in relation to other formal concepts, like 'subtract' or 'saturation' or 'presence'. These aren't real things; they're ways of manipulating other concepts. We have some very well-defined formal models, and they're built out of systems of words, and these are those words. They fail in that those formal models don't actually exist. But because they don't exist, a word like 'saturation' can be used in photography or cooking or physics.
With 'saturation' we build the system of words first and then try to shoehorn the things into them. With 'crickets' we see the things first and then try to cement a system of words to them.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's game (or one of them), unless I'm mistaken, is to treat the second kind of words as though they were the first. To talk about saturation or subtraction as though they were things we stumbled into and needed a word for.
April 25, 2015
"Light wind is an elixir of pine needles."
I can't get over that line! The experience of light wind to my face isn't any different because of it but now it's so much more clear to me what I am feeling!
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's book feels electronic like it's thin and portable but holds hundreds of sentences, "long shimmering lines shaped by the beauty and phenomenal fullness of the natural environment," giving it great density. Some of the blurbs describing her poems are poems themselves, and I wonder if she herself wrote the one on the back cover. I saw one review describe her as abstract environmental exploration but she waves thru the concrete too and I just feel overall so in touch, in tune: micro, macro. These poems are my dreams. I wake up feeling confused but evolved and understanding the work I will have to do to process what just happened in order to keep what I just learned.
"[T]he individual's relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time form a karmic temporal continuum, A MANDALA OF PERCEPTION, bridging quartz and quantum bond."
I can't get over that line! The experience of light wind to my face isn't any different because of it but now it's so much more clear to me what I am feeling!
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's book feels electronic like it's thin and portable but holds hundreds of sentences, "long shimmering lines shaped by the beauty and phenomenal fullness of the natural environment," giving it great density. Some of the blurbs describing her poems are poems themselves, and I wonder if she herself wrote the one on the back cover. I saw one review describe her as abstract environmental exploration but she waves thru the concrete too and I just feel overall so in touch, in tune: micro, macro. These poems are my dreams. I wake up feeling confused but evolved and understanding the work I will have to do to process what just happened in order to keep what I just learned.
"[T]he individual's relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time form a karmic temporal continuum, A MANDALA OF PERCEPTION, bridging quartz and quantum bond."
September 12, 2019
One of the best interviews with a poet I've ever read is http://cordite.org.au/interviews/tran....
I'm always interested in how art relates to survival. There are so many wildly different aspects to this interrelationship, like a carving of a goddess with many faces. This book strikes me as a sort of captivity narrative. Here, it's not some singular demonized Other (a people) that kidnaps the writer, but the dominant ideas of the culture(s) in which she lives. The poet wants to make clear that there has been a break with accepted belief systems, prevalent scientific ideas and even the social contract in its current formulation.
"Thoughts are sent out by one rock informing other rocks as to the nature of its changing environment, the angle of sun and temperatures cooling as night falls, and even its (loosely called) emotional tone changes, the appearance of a person walking, who's not appropriately empathetic." (from "Glitter")
Well, we now know that trees do this. Is this poetic license or do these lines espouse a belief the reader would expect to be found only in aboriginal cultures? Is the poet modeling a belief or cherishing it? I don't think the answer is important. I find the question fertile.
As with love, getting there is more important than how we got there.
I'm trying to remember if it was in an Armantrout poem, or in another's (Equi?), where mid-poem the speaker turns to us and says (paraphrase) "It's not whether you believe, but whether you want to believe." (italics the universe's)
In that linked interview, the author of this book insists that she has never understood a single poem in her life. I would relate that back to "A poem should not mean but be." She talks generously about her compositional techniques and how important text collage is to her, how the otherness of other minds is filtered through her sensibility and her sense of where words just belong, and ingrains. Is that admission any different than this admission: https://poets.org/poem/why-i-am-not-p... This technique (and this book somewhat) remind me of Barbara Guest's poetics, an artist with whom Berssenbrugge maintained a close friendship over much of that artist's lifetime.
But Berssenbrugge's long lines move closer to the prose poet's modus operandi. Not that she's not interested in linguistic textures (every great poet is). But it's more that she's creating essays or mock-essays and that intent comes first.
"One day you need a plant you don't know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you're trying to be with." (from "Slow Down, Now")
These essays in poetry don't espouse arguments in the traditional sense (another break with tradition). But if you think back to her The Heat Bird, those poems similarly seemed to be making supra-rational arguments by leaving out the syllogisms and still reaching conclusions which landed with the force of faith. That elliptical demarche clearly influenced other books like Rosmarie Waldrop's The Reproduction of Profiles. It's a delightful example of cross-pollination on psychic wavelengths. Waldrop applied Berssenbrugge's technique to Wittgenstein's writing. It worked.
This book is very much about immersion in nature but "made culture" is not given short shrift. The poet is interested in the distancing maneuvers the microcosm makes to separate from its macrocosm. That un-mothering thing.
Some choices you make will be important, will be everything.
"You could be a person or you could be immortal, a wave in the environment." (from "Immortals Having a Party.")
I was rereading this book in a crepuscular hour, after some time away from it, and stealing peeks out a window at the top of my house that shows me a wide swath of sky. I often check in at evening for the view of the river and the color gradients in the west. Just then, two deer, does, walked onto a grassy space where a house (or stables?) probably stood many years ago. After a bit, a man in a tank top emerged from a house and approached them. They clearly had an agreed-upon distance, all three, for the feeding. Then a black cat came over and walked around the legs of the deer, cautiously. The interactions only lasted for a few minutes. Then the deer started heading back towards the nearest copse of trees, the cat headed towards where she suspected night would be most interesting, and the man entered his home flickering a television light on the first floor.
This moment hinted at the new nature (the one purists "tsk tsk"...don't feed deer!). It was a momentary truce between species existing within forms of consciousness that are not nearly as different as it always seemed expedient for us to believe as a hungry apex predator. Many things are changing in that regard and will soon change even more drastically. (Hur-effin-rah.)
I felt the poems in Berssenbrugge's book were illuminating what I saw. And they were. Color gradients are prevalent in this collection. Consciousness gradients are prevalent in this collection.
"Light emits from a rotted flower." ("Her Calendar")
"Light is reversible." ("Immortals Having a Party")
"An experience is not one experience." ("Winter Whites")
It comes as good news that Berssenbrugge's next collection (again from New Directions) is only one winter away (drop date: February, 2020). The poet's work seems to fit in beautifully with the press that has published Rosmarie Waldrop, Gustaf Sobin and Michael Palmer, to name just a few writers whose work seems to fuse into a larger gestalt with hers.
I'm always interested in how art relates to survival. There are so many wildly different aspects to this interrelationship, like a carving of a goddess with many faces. This book strikes me as a sort of captivity narrative. Here, it's not some singular demonized Other (a people) that kidnaps the writer, but the dominant ideas of the culture(s) in which she lives. The poet wants to make clear that there has been a break with accepted belief systems, prevalent scientific ideas and even the social contract in its current formulation.
"Thoughts are sent out by one rock informing other rocks as to the nature of its changing environment, the angle of sun and temperatures cooling as night falls, and even its (loosely called) emotional tone changes, the appearance of a person walking, who's not appropriately empathetic." (from "Glitter")
Well, we now know that trees do this. Is this poetic license or do these lines espouse a belief the reader would expect to be found only in aboriginal cultures? Is the poet modeling a belief or cherishing it? I don't think the answer is important. I find the question fertile.
As with love, getting there is more important than how we got there.
I'm trying to remember if it was in an Armantrout poem, or in another's (Equi?), where mid-poem the speaker turns to us and says (paraphrase) "It's not whether you believe, but whether you want to believe." (italics the universe's)
In that linked interview, the author of this book insists that she has never understood a single poem in her life. I would relate that back to "A poem should not mean but be." She talks generously about her compositional techniques and how important text collage is to her, how the otherness of other minds is filtered through her sensibility and her sense of where words just belong, and ingrains. Is that admission any different than this admission: https://poets.org/poem/why-i-am-not-p... This technique (and this book somewhat) remind me of Barbara Guest's poetics, an artist with whom Berssenbrugge maintained a close friendship over much of that artist's lifetime.
But Berssenbrugge's long lines move closer to the prose poet's modus operandi. Not that she's not interested in linguistic textures (every great poet is). But it's more that she's creating essays or mock-essays and that intent comes first.
"One day you need a plant you don't know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you're trying to be with." (from "Slow Down, Now")
These essays in poetry don't espouse arguments in the traditional sense (another break with tradition). But if you think back to her The Heat Bird, those poems similarly seemed to be making supra-rational arguments by leaving out the syllogisms and still reaching conclusions which landed with the force of faith. That elliptical demarche clearly influenced other books like Rosmarie Waldrop's The Reproduction of Profiles. It's a delightful example of cross-pollination on psychic wavelengths. Waldrop applied Berssenbrugge's technique to Wittgenstein's writing. It worked.
This book is very much about immersion in nature but "made culture" is not given short shrift. The poet is interested in the distancing maneuvers the microcosm makes to separate from its macrocosm. That un-mothering thing.
Some choices you make will be important, will be everything.
"You could be a person or you could be immortal, a wave in the environment." (from "Immortals Having a Party.")
I was rereading this book in a crepuscular hour, after some time away from it, and stealing peeks out a window at the top of my house that shows me a wide swath of sky. I often check in at evening for the view of the river and the color gradients in the west. Just then, two deer, does, walked onto a grassy space where a house (or stables?) probably stood many years ago. After a bit, a man in a tank top emerged from a house and approached them. They clearly had an agreed-upon distance, all three, for the feeding. Then a black cat came over and walked around the legs of the deer, cautiously. The interactions only lasted for a few minutes. Then the deer started heading back towards the nearest copse of trees, the cat headed towards where she suspected night would be most interesting, and the man entered his home flickering a television light on the first floor.
This moment hinted at the new nature (the one purists "tsk tsk"...don't feed deer!). It was a momentary truce between species existing within forms of consciousness that are not nearly as different as it always seemed expedient for us to believe as a hungry apex predator. Many things are changing in that regard and will soon change even more drastically. (Hur-effin-rah.)
I felt the poems in Berssenbrugge's book were illuminating what I saw. And they were. Color gradients are prevalent in this collection. Consciousness gradients are prevalent in this collection.
"Light emits from a rotted flower." ("Her Calendar")
"Light is reversible." ("Immortals Having a Party")
"An experience is not one experience." ("Winter Whites")
It comes as good news that Berssenbrugge's next collection (again from New Directions) is only one winter away (drop date: February, 2020). The poet's work seems to fit in beautifully with the press that has published Rosmarie Waldrop, Gustaf Sobin and Michael Palmer, to name just a few writers whose work seems to fuse into a larger gestalt with hers.
June 22, 2020
‘O Rose, thou art…’
1.
If poetry has a point it is this. “Finished reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s ‘Hello, the Roses’. A new way of seeing/understanding the magic kaleidoscope connections we share between all living and non-living things. She’s like Gertrude Stein crossed with the Bergson of ‘Matter and Memory’, only with this naivety of style which is half dyslexia and half genius. She’s dazzling.”
2.
Like Gertrude Stein in her expressive distortions of syntax and her use of mysterious incantatory objects. A rose is a rose is a rose.
3.
She renders visible new perceptual and compassionate relationships between the landscape and living beings, across the spectrum, flora and fauna.
4.
Like Bergson in her logic of a world of images where everything affects everything else, however faintly. Only here she really spells it out. If time is vitality, or the élan vital, then ‘You and I nest within many such fields from a rose.’ (54)
5.
She implies affective relations between animals, plants, and humans without anthropomorphising; no glib sentiments or cheap gestures for doomed ecosystems. And yet, there’s compassion. She makes us love nature rather than hate mankind.
6.
‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’ (Wittgenstein)
Others give up too easily. What would it be for a rose or a dog to perceive the world? Try and convey this strange majesty:
‘When she whispers, you catch fragments of words, which seem nonsensical.’ (Berssenbrugge)
7.
Our lady of the cut up; Berssenbrugge, old school. Has a long table and a pair of scissors and snips her way through underlined phrases in Deleuze and biology textbooks and fashion magazines. Even her own phrases repeat as if approached from another angle. How could one translate these subtle shifts in register which betray their origins without smoothing out the halts? A translator’s words would derive from one source, as opposed to the General Text.
8.
An unrepentant follower of Chögyam Trungpa. A bona fide Tibetan Llama who went Andy Warhol. Rather than hide behind robes, embrace America as it is: drink, drive, bang. What if there really was a deeper ethical connection to the world and others which saints have found, each their own way? What if? Easier to be cynical and close a question of scientific credibility.
9.
Dyslexia as significant form. The best artworks make a virtue of their flaws. Not an achievement despite dyslexia, but because of. Uninhibited by proscriptive grammar, there’s something distinctive about her modest style which is not affected but natural.
10.
Just as her syntax does not recognise standard English, even when it’s transgressed, so her perceptions don’t employ arbitrary restrictions on relationships. ‘The violet, looking back, loses objectivity and enters the expansion of recognized things.’ (47)
11.
‘Hello, the Roses’ can be read productively alongside Goethe’s ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’. Both share a ‘delicate empiricism which makes itself identical with my plant.’ (51) Berssenbrugge enlightens us to ‘invisible wires of this passage’ (28) between the natural world and ours through a near psychotic empathy. She brings with her a botanist’s encyclopedia: beeches, ferns, saxifrage, reindeer moss, Solomon’s seal in bloom, young yucca, reality sunflowers, cereus, matrices of ephedra, oxalis, striped maple leaves the size of my hand, an elixir of pine needles.
12.
The second time you read it it makes more sense than you thought. With its use of ready-made phrases and unorthodox sentences, I couldn’t figure out why it was still a page turner. Then it came to me: the singular charm of ‘Hello, the Roses’ derives from the faint contours of common human occasions (a trip to the lake at night, a night out in town, an experience of illness), but qualified by a childlike logic linking nature and innocence: a dress can be a compassionate response to a dead dog, a swamp is a belt-drive turntable for a DJ Frog, gaps in the forest canopy a vase opening for flowers and birds, and besides, there’s ‘no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose’. (22)
1.
If poetry has a point it is this. “Finished reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s ‘Hello, the Roses’. A new way of seeing/understanding the magic kaleidoscope connections we share between all living and non-living things. She’s like Gertrude Stein crossed with the Bergson of ‘Matter and Memory’, only with this naivety of style which is half dyslexia and half genius. She’s dazzling.”
2.
Like Gertrude Stein in her expressive distortions of syntax and her use of mysterious incantatory objects. A rose is a rose is a rose.
3.
She renders visible new perceptual and compassionate relationships between the landscape and living beings, across the spectrum, flora and fauna.
4.
Like Bergson in her logic of a world of images where everything affects everything else, however faintly. Only here she really spells it out. If time is vitality, or the élan vital, then ‘You and I nest within many such fields from a rose.’ (54)
5.
She implies affective relations between animals, plants, and humans without anthropomorphising; no glib sentiments or cheap gestures for doomed ecosystems. And yet, there’s compassion. She makes us love nature rather than hate mankind.
6.
‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’ (Wittgenstein)
Others give up too easily. What would it be for a rose or a dog to perceive the world? Try and convey this strange majesty:
‘When she whispers, you catch fragments of words, which seem nonsensical.’ (Berssenbrugge)
7.
Our lady of the cut up; Berssenbrugge, old school. Has a long table and a pair of scissors and snips her way through underlined phrases in Deleuze and biology textbooks and fashion magazines. Even her own phrases repeat as if approached from another angle. How could one translate these subtle shifts in register which betray their origins without smoothing out the halts? A translator’s words would derive from one source, as opposed to the General Text.
8.
An unrepentant follower of Chögyam Trungpa. A bona fide Tibetan Llama who went Andy Warhol. Rather than hide behind robes, embrace America as it is: drink, drive, bang. What if there really was a deeper ethical connection to the world and others which saints have found, each their own way? What if? Easier to be cynical and close a question of scientific credibility.
9.
Dyslexia as significant form. The best artworks make a virtue of their flaws. Not an achievement despite dyslexia, but because of. Uninhibited by proscriptive grammar, there’s something distinctive about her modest style which is not affected but natural.
10.
Just as her syntax does not recognise standard English, even when it’s transgressed, so her perceptions don’t employ arbitrary restrictions on relationships. ‘The violet, looking back, loses objectivity and enters the expansion of recognized things.’ (47)
11.
‘Hello, the Roses’ can be read productively alongside Goethe’s ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’. Both share a ‘delicate empiricism which makes itself identical with my plant.’ (51) Berssenbrugge enlightens us to ‘invisible wires of this passage’ (28) between the natural world and ours through a near psychotic empathy. She brings with her a botanist’s encyclopedia: beeches, ferns, saxifrage, reindeer moss, Solomon’s seal in bloom, young yucca, reality sunflowers, cereus, matrices of ephedra, oxalis, striped maple leaves the size of my hand, an elixir of pine needles.
12.
The second time you read it it makes more sense than you thought. With its use of ready-made phrases and unorthodox sentences, I couldn’t figure out why it was still a page turner. Then it came to me: the singular charm of ‘Hello, the Roses’ derives from the faint contours of common human occasions (a trip to the lake at night, a night out in town, an experience of illness), but qualified by a childlike logic linking nature and innocence: a dress can be a compassionate response to a dead dog, a swamp is a belt-drive turntable for a DJ Frog, gaps in the forest canopy a vase opening for flowers and birds, and besides, there’s ‘no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose’. (22)
March 11, 2025
This book feels a little bit too smart for me but I love it
August 14, 2013
Really impressive collection, I only wish I'd read it sooner. The language and structure are tight and consistent, tying the central themes together, and the density of meaning in each line makes this volume worth a reread. Nature is not just a subject in Berssenbrugge's poems, it's so active and pertinent and transformative, which is refreshing. It's been a while since I've come across a poetry collection that is as simultaneously thought-provoking and enjoyable as Hello, The Roses, and this definitely goes on my Best of the Year list.
April 14, 2022
Read this aloud - you will find yourself suspended in a liminal place between time, where words become images so effortlessly you forget you are immersed in language and not the worlds Berssenbrugge conjures.
A beautiful moment to both escape reality and yet newly see your position within it.
A beautiful moment to both escape reality and yet newly see your position within it.
July 22, 2021
So fucking genius. The perfect clash of a heady thinker and an acolyte of nature. Also I think the closest I’ve seen writing approximates being on psychedelics… a deep dive into roses, as suggested by the title. A true goddamn original.
May 23, 2014
Allyson Paty (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I’ve never read anything quite like Mei-Mei Berrsenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses. The poems have an essayistic quality in their deliberate, attentive movement. However, unlike many discursive modes, Berrsenbrugge’s poems don’t seem preoccupied with fixing an idea in language; rather, language provides a medium for the material world to open out into sensation, emotion, and thought. Her images evoking the experience of sight as crisply as they evoke their referents.
Take this passage from “Pure Immanence”:
It makes of my experience a critique of innateness, the way a pink plastic chair, a mannequin in a pink bunny suit holding a painting of sunset accretes virtual rouge defining a space that doesn’t refer to objects or belong to me.
I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered; it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close to two sensations, passing from one to another pink is the slice through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation now as to pink petals forming toward me, those who love me in another life responding to me
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.
Take this passage from “Pure Immanence”:
It makes of my experience a critique of innateness, the way a pink plastic chair, a mannequin in a pink bunny suit holding a painting of sunset accretes virtual rouge defining a space that doesn’t refer to objects or belong to me.
I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered; it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close to two sensations, passing from one to another pink is the slice through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation now as to pink petals forming toward me, those who love me in another life responding to me
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.
June 28, 2016
I'm not sure if I didn't get it or if I just didn't like it. I'm leaning towards the former because everyone else on this page is loving this collection of poetry.
I kept getting stuck reading and rereading sentences, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Words like "dimensionality" and "connectedness" and "consciousness" are now seared into my eyeballs.
But, there was some pretty imagery:
All the trees are misted in light. (42)
Sun lights a gray cloud above me, with so many rooms and convexities. (69)
This book was sent to me as part of the Daniel Handler Postal Club. I appreciate the opportunity to read something that I might not normally pick up. Even if it left me puzzled.
I kept getting stuck reading and rereading sentences, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Words like "dimensionality" and "connectedness" and "consciousness" are now seared into my eyeballs.
But, there was some pretty imagery:
All the trees are misted in light. (42)
Sun lights a gray cloud above me, with so many rooms and convexities. (69)
This book was sent to me as part of the Daniel Handler Postal Club. I appreciate the opportunity to read something that I might not normally pick up. Even if it left me puzzled.
November 18, 2020
“Forest is the originary fullness of presence, as if woods along my path were a
Region of consciousness like landscape in a dream, but my perception of moving
greens in nature is not of my making, as the dream is of my weaving.”
“You could say our identities reach out to encompass the forest environment, like
Telepathy; a moment opens space by rendering it transparent in intensified
Consciousness.”
“Others embrace weather and wild land as their means to the supra-sensible; in
Violets, it’s emotional desire for spring light: glitter, the mirror.”
Surreal, ethereal, and dreamlike, this booklong poem is a story and prayer. I think I always imagined poetry to be exactly like this, opaque and inscrutable but beautiful. She says, “I tell you, your own thoughts and words can appear to inhabitants of other systems like stars and planets to us.” I was typing some notes from another book I was reading, The Songs of Trees, and my fingers continued to add an e to plant so instead of Plant, I was talking about planets and my thoughts were dreamy and floating with the stars for a while. So I get it. She says, “Intensities of thought, light, and shadow between us, contain memories coiled, one within the other, through which I travel to you, and yet are beautifully undetermined.” I love that sentence, and it seems to be exactly what love is.
In synchronicity with The Songs of Tree, she writes, “thoughts are sent out by one rock informing other rocks as to the nature of its changing environment, the angle of sun and temperatures cooling as night falls, and even its (loosely called) emotional tone changes, the appearance of a person walking, who’s not appropriately empathic.” That is what trees do, not rocks, but what do we really know? We can’t always measure these things, yet, after all.
“One day you need a PLANT you don’t know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, Or in a person you’re trying to be with.” Or “One day you need a PLANET you don’t know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you’re trying to be with.” I love both, and imagination takes you places with both, one rooted on earth, on the land, weaving a physical connection in your own psyche or your connection to a loved one; the other taking flight into the universe where numberless planets circle numberless stars and spirit links your parts to each other and to your loved one. Which you prefer can help you know who to love, I think.
Excerpts:
“A sapling moves to the right a fraction of an inch.
Rocks, leaves, lady slipper interweave.
A bug turns into the tip of a blade of grass.
All the trees are misted with light.
My seeing becomes so transparent and natural, a vista of awareness into which
Consciousness flows.
However massive, an old tree stands as the embodiment of something coming
Into appearance.
Tree and forest, a piece of sky and its circle of illumination on the floor are what
You might call pre-given to me, because I’m telling it to you.”
“There’s a legacy of an order of events in a house with long views down the valley.
An act is by chance, as a word may be ancillary to meaning.
Wisteria, terraced fields, far areas of wildflowers, shadows changing with the day
Lay ground for more abstract forms.
I feel the loftiness of fate here, straighten and walk out in thin air, filaments of
Light like whispers drawing me.”
“I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered, it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close two sensations, passing from one to another is pink through and through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation no as to pink petals forming toward me, those who
Love me in another life responding to me.
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.”
“We stand in vernal marsh surrounded by spring peepers so loud I feel like a
Tuning fork vibrating.
The half moon rises over trees sends shadows across water in complexities of
Light reflections, of opaque grasses, skunk cabbage, violet, indigo streaming into
Saturation like blowing sand.
Why don’t we enjoy the night more often?
A density of peepers, bullfrogs, crickets, cicadas rounds the corner of my hearing.”
Gems:
“Where dark sky fills with breezes, currents, moisture, dust particles and so forth,
A parallel vault moves (as clouds merge and fuse) to form our psychological
Climate, a growth medium, like creativity in a dream rummaging through nights
In the future for data.”
“Spaces fuse; skin takes on crickets, tree frogs; owls take on polyrhythms, magic
And its overlaps.”
“This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives lights frequencies of the flower as a hologram.”
“There’s an absolute, the sacred, which manifests in the world, making it real. Sacred means saturated with being.”
“I call if a vase, upward space for materializing flowers or birdsong where openness
Is form, of song and interior light, emerald greens, yellow greens, blue greens, gray green.
“A tree with foliage grows more intently focused as if dream-words finally bring forth
a physical tree, but more aware, so its identity doesn’t stop where bark stops.”
“ each time I dream yellow foliage, it’s in different light.”
“My wishes aren’t separate from the environment, which is a portion of
Connectivity, with new species emerging all the time.
I myself may be part of an emergence, dizzy, unaware I’ve crossed a threshold
into new focus.”
“There are beings who combine what I diversify. My thoughts operate as electrons there.”
Region of consciousness like landscape in a dream, but my perception of moving
greens in nature is not of my making, as the dream is of my weaving.”
“You could say our identities reach out to encompass the forest environment, like
Telepathy; a moment opens space by rendering it transparent in intensified
Consciousness.”
“Others embrace weather and wild land as their means to the supra-sensible; in
Violets, it’s emotional desire for spring light: glitter, the mirror.”
Surreal, ethereal, and dreamlike, this booklong poem is a story and prayer. I think I always imagined poetry to be exactly like this, opaque and inscrutable but beautiful. She says, “I tell you, your own thoughts and words can appear to inhabitants of other systems like stars and planets to us.” I was typing some notes from another book I was reading, The Songs of Trees, and my fingers continued to add an e to plant so instead of Plant, I was talking about planets and my thoughts were dreamy and floating with the stars for a while. So I get it. She says, “Intensities of thought, light, and shadow between us, contain memories coiled, one within the other, through which I travel to you, and yet are beautifully undetermined.” I love that sentence, and it seems to be exactly what love is.
In synchronicity with The Songs of Tree, she writes, “thoughts are sent out by one rock informing other rocks as to the nature of its changing environment, the angle of sun and temperatures cooling as night falls, and even its (loosely called) emotional tone changes, the appearance of a person walking, who’s not appropriately empathic.” That is what trees do, not rocks, but what do we really know? We can’t always measure these things, yet, after all.
“One day you need a PLANT you don’t know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, Or in a person you’re trying to be with.” Or “One day you need a PLANET you don’t know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you’re trying to be with.” I love both, and imagination takes you places with both, one rooted on earth, on the land, weaving a physical connection in your own psyche or your connection to a loved one; the other taking flight into the universe where numberless planets circle numberless stars and spirit links your parts to each other and to your loved one. Which you prefer can help you know who to love, I think.
Excerpts:
“A sapling moves to the right a fraction of an inch.
Rocks, leaves, lady slipper interweave.
A bug turns into the tip of a blade of grass.
All the trees are misted with light.
My seeing becomes so transparent and natural, a vista of awareness into which
Consciousness flows.
However massive, an old tree stands as the embodiment of something coming
Into appearance.
Tree and forest, a piece of sky and its circle of illumination on the floor are what
You might call pre-given to me, because I’m telling it to you.”
“There’s a legacy of an order of events in a house with long views down the valley.
An act is by chance, as a word may be ancillary to meaning.
Wisteria, terraced fields, far areas of wildflowers, shadows changing with the day
Lay ground for more abstract forms.
I feel the loftiness of fate here, straighten and walk out in thin air, filaments of
Light like whispers drawing me.”
“I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered, it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close two sensations, passing from one to another is pink through and through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation no as to pink petals forming toward me, those who
Love me in another life responding to me.
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.”
“We stand in vernal marsh surrounded by spring peepers so loud I feel like a
Tuning fork vibrating.
The half moon rises over trees sends shadows across water in complexities of
Light reflections, of opaque grasses, skunk cabbage, violet, indigo streaming into
Saturation like blowing sand.
Why don’t we enjoy the night more often?
A density of peepers, bullfrogs, crickets, cicadas rounds the corner of my hearing.”
Gems:
“Where dark sky fills with breezes, currents, moisture, dust particles and so forth,
A parallel vault moves (as clouds merge and fuse) to form our psychological
Climate, a growth medium, like creativity in a dream rummaging through nights
In the future for data.”
“Spaces fuse; skin takes on crickets, tree frogs; owls take on polyrhythms, magic
And its overlaps.”
“This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives lights frequencies of the flower as a hologram.”
“There’s an absolute, the sacred, which manifests in the world, making it real. Sacred means saturated with being.”
“I call if a vase, upward space for materializing flowers or birdsong where openness
Is form, of song and interior light, emerald greens, yellow greens, blue greens, gray green.
“A tree with foliage grows more intently focused as if dream-words finally bring forth
a physical tree, but more aware, so its identity doesn’t stop where bark stops.”
“ each time I dream yellow foliage, it’s in different light.”
“My wishes aren’t separate from the environment, which is a portion of
Connectivity, with new species emerging all the time.
I myself may be part of an emergence, dizzy, unaware I’ve crossed a threshold
into new focus.”
“There are beings who combine what I diversify. My thoughts operate as electrons there.”
July 16, 2013
"Amplification of wind in leaves expands to shimmering surface intermittence."
"One day you need a plant you don't know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you're trying to be with."
"Communication flows back and forth between the rose and myself, and I begin perceiving through the plant."
"One day you need a plant you don't know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you're trying to be with."
"Communication flows back and forth between the rose and myself, and I begin perceiving through the plant."
August 11, 2013
When I tried to write poetry in high school, a favorite English teacher told me that I wrote poetic sentences rather than poetry. He might have said the same thing about this very readable collection which consists of well formed sentences. It might inspire me to try again.
February 18, 2016
"Is that like saying a pond is my brain?" I ask and frogs answer, "More like the shape of holding our thoughts!"
-"Animal Voices"
Then, you're like an exhausted mouse slumped over the rim of a flowerpot of torn leaves, "She left me; I trashed my plant. Now, everything is fucked."
-"The Mouse"
-"Animal Voices"
Then, you're like an exhausted mouse slumped over the rim of a flowerpot of torn leaves, "She left me; I trashed my plant. Now, everything is fucked."
-"The Mouse"
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 1, 2018
What a unique, strange voice. What a haunting, moving collection. Berssenbrugge's rhythms and perspective are unlike anything I have ever read. Consider, for example, this line from her poem, "Karmic Trace" : "Autumn-blue sky between branches narrates a kinship between air and awareness, two sisters, anima and atmosphere." Visual and electrifying, nature in haunting cadence. A refreshing, bright collection of whimsical writing. Check it out!
August 27, 2022
"Intense emotions are symbolized as mythic figures or deities."
mei-mei berssenbrugge, i didn't know what poetry was until i read your work. i wish i could bottle up the feeling that i get while reading your words. feel so lucky that i randomly picked up this book at a second-hand bookstore.
"I equate hope with intuition."
"That's why we need the identity of our physical forms. / Here, we don't know what's behind physical stars and planets."
mei-mei berssenbrugge, i didn't know what poetry was until i read your work. i wish i could bottle up the feeling that i get while reading your words. feel so lucky that i randomly picked up this book at a second-hand bookstore.
"I equate hope with intuition."
"That's why we need the identity of our physical forms. / Here, we don't know what's behind physical stars and planets."
December 21, 2025
berssenbruge's lines span the long arc between something like perception & the formation of thought. the latter is suffused with the discourse that has made abstraction palpably available. the rose holds color the way your eye holds light. this collection did lose me slightly towards the end but as an entire poetic project (beyond this book too) berssenbrugge's approach is one i deeply admire & respect. because of plants, this is a particular favorite
March 11, 2021
The attention here to the natural world reminded me of Basho and of Louise Glück's The Wild Iris.
Favorites: "Pure Immanence," "Winter Whites," "Glitter," "Verdant Heart," "Hello, the Roses," & "Karmic Trace"
Favorites: "Pure Immanence," "Winter Whites," "Glitter," "Verdant Heart," "Hello, the Roses," & "Karmic Trace"
January 6, 2017
Once again, I don't have the patience for this. I would really like to like these poems, but they're too abstract for me rn
October 4, 2020
i think this could be my book of prayer
March 19, 2024
“By illness, I mean my life reduced to reactive, devotional processes” (23)
March 12, 2025
Karma is reformation, a distant remembering like feeling, something dim growing brighter.
Discontinuity becomes continuity; the memory sort of glitters as it flows.
Discontinuity becomes continuity; the memory sort of glitters as it flows.
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October 20, 2013i really loved most of the poems in this book. i liked how it was all transcendental but also just talking about flowers and plants. i liked how it was language poetry-y a little bit but all the images as well. i liked how she talked about accidents. at the same time i thought it went a little too long in the same tone and same kind of form. i was a bit tired of the way the poems were crafted in the last third of the book, because formally, it was just the same over and over. really good book, just hoping mei-mei mixes it up more in the future. i think it would make her books even better.
January 29, 2020
There are no words to describe how absolutely vital this book is. A manual of sentience. You will never peel the accurate levels of description in these poems—presentation of lyric being. Shipwreck book & desert island.
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August 9, 2013811.6 B535h 2013
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