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Empathy
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.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
9 people are currently reading
181 people want to read
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 - 17 of 17 reviews
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August 30, 2023Some quick thoughts here: https://youtu.be/oNGJuZJA-KQ
February 15, 2024
Holy shit this is amazing?? Poetry has probably never locked me in as hard as this did, it's overall a medium I struggle with but this was just non stop aesthetic pleasure from the first poem to the last and I'm very thankful for it because it's seriously made me hopeful that this medium can click with me as hard as prose can. This is surprisingly prosaic at points so that could explain my partiality to it, but it is clearly working on the level of poetry and clearly the work of a sui generis artist... the way she doesn't deconstruct but moreso artfully rearranges space and perspective is astounding, it's extremely abstract in its execution, almost fourth dimensional as far as that's even possible, but despite this there's always a solid tether to the relatable and personal. As one would imagine this is extraordinarily dense and difficult to puzzle out, but in a way that is really engaging and incentivizes me to really soak in the pages here, rather than just giving the poems one go-over I was really trying to explore them from every angle I could conceive of; reading under my breath, considering the meaning of the pieces titles in the context and reconsidering the context each time I thought about it, going over certain lines again to sink into the imagery and the themes [I think] she's trying to invoke... it's just stunning, there isn't a wasted line here, it's just pure surreal, otherworldly music
That sense of constant Recontextualization in my brainspace to what I was experiencing here felt really appropriate considering that aforementioned Intradimensionality, literally Everything here can be looked at as though light through a prism, but also every single piece here is totally distinct and clearly in service to a central premise in each that I don't entirely "get" but nonetheless felt. There's so much to latch on to however way you slice it; Berssenbrugge encourages a free associative sense of information compartmentalization that's unlike any attempt at it I've seen done before, plus all the haunting earthy and celestial imagery, the fascination with shape and sound and Form, and a quiet and all abiding undercurrent of authentic East Asian spirituality threading all of this together without ever really showing its hand... I will certainly be flipping through the poems here again and again, this is the kind of thing you need to immerse yourself in, which is not difficult because it is completely captivating from the get go, you just sink into it like you're being engulfed by the rippling surface of a magic mirror. Something very, very special here!!
That sense of constant Recontextualization in my brainspace to what I was experiencing here felt really appropriate considering that aforementioned Intradimensionality, literally Everything here can be looked at as though light through a prism, but also every single piece here is totally distinct and clearly in service to a central premise in each that I don't entirely "get" but nonetheless felt. There's so much to latch on to however way you slice it; Berssenbrugge encourages a free associative sense of information compartmentalization that's unlike any attempt at it I've seen done before, plus all the haunting earthy and celestial imagery, the fascination with shape and sound and Form, and a quiet and all abiding undercurrent of authentic East Asian spirituality threading all of this together without ever really showing its hand... I will certainly be flipping through the poems here again and again, this is the kind of thing you need to immerse yourself in, which is not difficult because it is completely captivating from the get go, you just sink into it like you're being engulfed by the rippling surface of a magic mirror. Something very, very special here!!
Read
March 17, 2025This book felt like communicating w aliens. The sentences were confidently complex and made no human sense. Lots of abstractions which I was trained to distrust, but it was nice to see them as decor rather than vessels for meaning and they made the glimpses of concrete color feel so vivid. “If the tree is yellow in the fall in mercury light in the river, I feel it gather its color from the river.” I usually don’t think much of readings but I would like to see her read bc I would like to meet a real life alien
The long sentences and lines felt like they were reaching for something, the way perception or desire does. I liked the poems that were “set” in a specific architectural space, where the looking was in closer range, but still the poems often slipped out of that space. Like “tan tien” and “Chinese space.” I can’t believe she wrote endnotes that were both plainspoken in a way her poems weren’t and still the same ethereal vibe as her poems - “I allowed emotion to glue sentence to sentence… I did not understand what I wrote” and “the slow arc of the sun across ‘empty’ land became long, poetic lines”
The long sentences and lines felt like they were reaching for something, the way perception or desire does. I liked the poems that were “set” in a specific architectural space, where the looking was in closer range, but still the poems often slipped out of that space. Like “tan tien” and “Chinese space.” I can’t believe she wrote endnotes that were both plainspoken in a way her poems weren’t and still the same ethereal vibe as her poems - “I allowed emotion to glue sentence to sentence… I did not understand what I wrote” and “the slow arc of the sun across ‘empty’ land became long, poetic lines”
March 5, 2023
I was thinking “this sounds like Wittgenstein” and then in the endnotes the author reveals her influence. This collection of poems reads almost as a personal philosophical treatise, a reckoning of the world in the form of thought. Truthfully, this works out better in some places than in others. To speak in the terms of representations and other abstract concepts made me continue to look for the lapses where she breaks away to reveal what she is speaking to directly. In “Forms of Politeness” this is especially interesting, as she is processing an interaction she had with a woman who hanged herself in an orchard near her parent’s house. I was also quite fond of “Fog” for helping to visualize her philosophizing. It is moments like these where her writing becomes most clear and enjoyable. While the entire collection is fascinating it is also alienating for its choice of language. I came across the author through her connection with Arthur Sze, and the two share a strangeness that is both wonderful and frustrating.
November 17, 2023
Dense and powerful- language approaches and retreats from meaning again and again in ways that soon begin to feel like the textures of thinking, seeing.
I’m new to this poet, and from what I understand this book marked a shift in her work towards her characteristic long lines as well as a phenomenological use of language. While masterful, some of these poems have a quality of venturing into unexplored territory by way of form; this too is part of their pleasure. I’m curious to read subsequent books, where this way of writing is more lived-in.
I’m new to this poet, and from what I understand this book marked a shift in her work towards her characteristic long lines as well as a phenomenological use of language. While masterful, some of these poems have a quality of venturing into unexplored territory by way of form; this too is part of their pleasure. I’m curious to read subsequent books, where this way of writing is more lived-in.
April 28, 2025
I didn't like this. I had to read it for my college poetry class, and as much as she said she tried to make it feminist, it comes off as I'm not like other girls lowkey, I don't know my entire class disliked it. After reading so much poetry this semester, this doesn't hold up to my expectations because it's so reductive.
January 29, 2022
There is your 'dream' and its 'approximation'.
Sometimes the particular attributes of your labyrinth
seem not so ghastly. More often blue shimmering
walls of the house crack with a sudden drop
in temperature at night, or the builder substitutes
cobalt plaster, which won't hold at this exposure.
Your client vetoes a roof garden, often
because of money, or he lies to kiss you at dawn
and you want to sleep late. Sometimes a person
holds out for the flawless bevelled edge, but might
end up with something half-built, its inlay
scavenged long ago.
Let a ragged edge between the two be lightning or falling water, and figure its use: the distance
away of a person poised in the air with wings on.
If you string a rope through a pulley at his waist
at least you can lift the New Zealand ferns.
Any fall will seem deliberate.
* * *
I used the table as a reference and just did things from there
in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is
an air of truth living objects and persons you use take on,
when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege
on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence
is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself.
First the table is the table. In blue light
or in electric light, it has no pathos. Then light separates
from the human content, a violet-coloured net or immaterial haze, echoing
the violet ice plant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.
Such emotions are interruptions in landscape and in logic
brought on by a longing for direct experience, as if her memory of experience
were the trace of herself. Especially now, when things have been flying apart in all directions,
she will consider her hotel lobby the inert state of a form. It is the location
of her appointment. And gray enamel elevator doors are the relation state,
space behind them being a ground of water or the figure of water. Now,
she turns her camera on them to change her thinking about them into a thought
in Mexico, as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside
the elevator via a blue Cadillac into a long tracking shot. You linger
over your hand at the table. The light becomes a gold wing on the table. She sees
opening, with an environment inside that is plastic and infinite,
but it is a style that has got the future wrong.
* * *
Attention was commanded through a simple, unadorned, unexplained, often decentered presence,
up to now, a margin of empty space like water, its surface contracting, then melting
along buried pipelines, where gulls gather in euphoric buoyancy. Now,
the growth of size is vital, the significance of contraction by a moat, a flowerbed, or
a fenced path around the reservoir, its ability to induce the mind’s growing experience of the breadth
and depth of physical association, which turns out to be both vital and insufficient, because
nature never provides a border for us, of infinite elements irregularly but flexibly integrated,
like the rhythm between fatigue and relief of accommodation, or like a large apartment. Now,
the construction is not the structure of your making love to me. The size of your body on mine
does not equal your weight or buoyancy, like fireworks on a television screen, or the way
an absent double expresses inaccuracy between what exists and does not exist in the room
of particular shape, volume, etc., minute areas and inferred lines we are talking about.
You have made a vow to a woman not to sleep with me. For me, it seemed enough
that love was a spiritual exercise in physical form and what was seen is what it was,
looking down from the twelfth floor, our arms resting on pillows on the windowsill. It is midnight.
Fireworks reflected in the reservoir burst simultaneously on the south and the north shores,
so we keep turning our heads quickly for both of the starry spheres,
instead of a tangible, and an intangible event that does not reflect. Certain
definite brightness contains spaciousness. A starry night, like a fully reflecting surface,
claims no particular status in space, or being of its own
Sometimes the particular attributes of your labyrinth
seem not so ghastly. More often blue shimmering
walls of the house crack with a sudden drop
in temperature at night, or the builder substitutes
cobalt plaster, which won't hold at this exposure.
Your client vetoes a roof garden, often
because of money, or he lies to kiss you at dawn
and you want to sleep late. Sometimes a person
holds out for the flawless bevelled edge, but might
end up with something half-built, its inlay
scavenged long ago.
Let a ragged edge between the two be lightning or falling water, and figure its use: the distance
away of a person poised in the air with wings on.
If you string a rope through a pulley at his waist
at least you can lift the New Zealand ferns.
Any fall will seem deliberate.
- The Blue Taj, pg. 13
* * *
I used the table as a reference and just did things from there
in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is
an air of truth living objects and persons you use take on,
when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege
on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence
is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself.
First the table is the table. In blue light
or in electric light, it has no pathos. Then light separates
from the human content, a violet-coloured net or immaterial haze, echoing
the violet ice plant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.
Such emotions are interruptions in landscape and in logic
brought on by a longing for direct experience, as if her memory of experience
were the trace of herself. Especially now, when things have been flying apart in all directions,
she will consider her hotel lobby the inert state of a form. It is the location
of her appointment. And gray enamel elevator doors are the relation state,
space behind them being a ground of water or the figure of water. Now,
she turns her camera on them to change her thinking about them into a thought
in Mexico, as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside
the elevator via a blue Cadillac into a long tracking shot. You linger
over your hand at the table. The light becomes a gold wing on the table. She sees
opening, with an environment inside that is plastic and infinite,
but it is a style that has got the future wrong.
- Texas, pg. 25
* * *
Attention was commanded through a simple, unadorned, unexplained, often decentered presence,
up to now, a margin of empty space like water, its surface contracting, then melting
along buried pipelines, where gulls gather in euphoric buoyancy. Now,
the growth of size is vital, the significance of contraction by a moat, a flowerbed, or
a fenced path around the reservoir, its ability to induce the mind’s growing experience of the breadth
and depth of physical association, which turns out to be both vital and insufficient, because
nature never provides a border for us, of infinite elements irregularly but flexibly integrated,
like the rhythm between fatigue and relief of accommodation, or like a large apartment. Now,
the construction is not the structure of your making love to me. The size of your body on mine
does not equal your weight or buoyancy, like fireworks on a television screen, or the way
an absent double expresses inaccuracy between what exists and does not exist in the room
of particular shape, volume, etc., minute areas and inferred lines we are talking about.
You have made a vow to a woman not to sleep with me. For me, it seemed enough
that love was a spiritual exercise in physical form and what was seen is what it was,
looking down from the twelfth floor, our arms resting on pillows on the windowsill. It is midnight.
Fireworks reflected in the reservoir burst simultaneously on the south and the north shores,
so we keep turning our heads quickly for both of the starry spheres,
instead of a tangible, and an intangible event that does not reflect. Certain
definite brightness contains spaciousness. A starry night, like a fully reflecting surface,
claims no particular status in space, or being of its own
- Jealousy, pg. 33
May 2, 2025
Tan Tien
'As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell
which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps.
It’s a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating
the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance,
which was intentionally blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall,
far enough in back of the arch for sun to light.
If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing.
And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine,
like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall
to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time,
an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced,
dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone.
Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board,
but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length,
disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing.
The stick isn’t really the temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor.
This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be parallel levitation in the spine
the person recording it.
Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair’s outline gives way to its duration
as it extends and rises at a low angle.
In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all
wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall.
First the gold knob, then blue tiers above the highest step,
the same color as the sky.
When one person came to gain confidence,
she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites
in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe.
Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust
when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within
is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon
on the marble paving stones.
Yet she’s reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor
could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt
to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong
as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor
and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles,
or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.'
from Texas
14 ‘I used the table as a reference and just did things from there
in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is
an air of truth living persons and objects you use take on
when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege
on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence
is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself
First the table is the table. In blue light
nor in electric light does it create pathos. Then the light separates
from the human content, a violet-colored net or immaterial haze, echoing
the violet iceplant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.’
'As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell
which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps.
It’s a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating
the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance,
which was intentionally blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall,
far enough in back of the arch for sun to light.
If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing.
And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine,
like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall
to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time,
an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced,
dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone.
Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board,
but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length,
disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing.
The stick isn’t really the temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor.
This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be parallel levitation in the spine
the person recording it.
Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair’s outline gives way to its duration
as it extends and rises at a low angle.
In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all
wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall.
First the gold knob, then blue tiers above the highest step,
the same color as the sky.
When one person came to gain confidence,
she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites
in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe.
Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust
when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within
is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon
on the marble paving stones.
Yet she’s reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor
could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt
to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong
as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor
and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles,
or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.'
from Texas
14 ‘I used the table as a reference and just did things from there
in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is
an air of truth living persons and objects you use take on
when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege
on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence
is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself
First the table is the table. In blue light
nor in electric light does it create pathos. Then the light separates
from the human content, a violet-colored net or immaterial haze, echoing
the violet iceplant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.’
November 11, 2025
I would say I’m a lover of poetry. My favorites include Plath, TS Eliot, Dickinson.
This felt more like trying to slog through a dense philosophy paper than a poetry collection. I remember starting this book ten years ago and getting a headache trying to unravel the first poem. The first few pages are still covered in my desperate, confused annotations. This time, armed with another decade of experience, I decided to not obsess over understanding every line, to just glide through and hope the poems would make more sense if I took a step back and looked at them as a whole. For the most part, this new approach did not help. I managed to stave off headaches only by reading in small doses and accepting that I simply was not going to parse most of what was being said.
Clearly other people enjoyed this. I don’t get it, but I’m glad you’re all having a good time.
This felt more like trying to slog through a dense philosophy paper than a poetry collection. I remember starting this book ten years ago and getting a headache trying to unravel the first poem. The first few pages are still covered in my desperate, confused annotations. This time, armed with another decade of experience, I decided to not obsess over understanding every line, to just glide through and hope the poems would make more sense if I took a step back and looked at them as a whole. For the most part, this new approach did not help. I managed to stave off headaches only by reading in small doses and accepting that I simply was not going to parse most of what was being said.
Clearly other people enjoyed this. I don’t get it, but I’m glad you’re all having a good time.
December 21, 2025
part of what i glean from this book is that any form--thought, speech, phenomena--leaves a residual force, energy, or field available for holding. this shifts the poetic project, i think, from accurately naming various processes *as* they happen to gathering (or even inconclusively listing) the imperfect & linguistic scattering of experience. it is as if we could only understand light in its aftermath. that's one way i approach the "empathy" idea too--the subsequent reckoning with incipient connection
November 15, 2023
~2.75
A vast desert of mumbo jumbo with a few good ideas scattered in.
A vast desert of mumbo jumbo with a few good ideas scattered in.
August 8, 2025
interruptions in landscape, vicissitudes of light
October 6, 2025
this was a lovely meditation on empathy
September 2, 2008
glaciers.
August 1, 2011
1990 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Poetry
September 30, 2013
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge stops time, repeatedly. We exist within the word we are reading -- nowhere else. This is the rarest of treats. An emotional tight-rope walk where the string is language.
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December 15, 2017811.54 B53e 1989
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews