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A Treatise on Stars - Paperback | Diverse Reads

A Treatise on Stars

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Notes From Your Bookseller

A Treatise on Stars is a truly original set of poems that turns into a treatise on the human condition. Berssenbrugge takes us far out into the galaxy as if she were a physicist and then brings us home as a sprit guide. Her words float on the astral plane and yet remain grounded. That’s the line a poet walks—always between two worlds.

An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau)

Winner of the Bollingen Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award
Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize

A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

ISBN-13: 9780811229388

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

Publication Date: 02-25-2020

Pages: 96

Product Dimensions: 8.40(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.20(d)

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Empathy, Nest, and I Love Artists. A Lit Cloud, her recent collaboration with the artist Kiki Smith, was published by Galerie Lelong in 2012. She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.