A Treatise on Stars

by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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.”

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2020

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

[Atri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remembering concentrates something at work in the present; visibility is like memory, dimensions also; invisible, organizing substrates unify past and present.

***

Perhaps creativity is the unfoldment of relations between objective and emotion in space.
...
I aspire for transparent space to diffuse dissonance inside me to its quantum complement; sky lightens.

***

Looking is an innate impulse toward wholeness.

***

Growth indicates intelligence of the universe as a whole in space you measure between heartbeats: new content, new time.

***

From starlight I sense a pulse like breathing, but only the exhale of radiance to intensifying radiance as beauty.

***

You shift into gold on water at the end of the day; a day can change shape, also.

***

"Some words I read weren't there when I began."

***

Early on, I divined that this book already exists in the future.

After all, I thought of it; it's a probability somewhere, complete, on a shelf.

My intention is to consult that future edition and create this one, the original, for you.

***

Writing can shift the mechanism of time by changing the record, then changing the event.

***

Trust that when earth moves, you move in sync.

Days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to the expanding present.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems had a very new age, mystical feel to them. This kept me at some distance from them as a lot of the imagery felt hollow. Structurally good, but just not something that I could connect with.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can rise to a level of not knowing that's untouched by entropy.

Out of uncertainty, openness: order is maintained.

You rise to a realization beyond decay.

There's a deeper intelligence than that."

Berssenbrugge is a favorite of mine, and this collection is a cohesion of science, magic, philosophy, and nature. Her lines are designed to enact the reader's senses and open their mind. While the poems are long and not terribly narrative or lyrical, they're thought-provoking in a pleasing way, especially if you're a creative type. Read these, let them push you to a thinking that is somehow both large and intimate.

[June · Rating 3 out of 5]

C-osmos blow in space,
O-dyssey through time;
V-essels flow to a place,
I-sland earth low chime:
D-estiny aglow in grace.

[alisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

literally never looking at the night sky again

3.5/5 stars

language so complicated i just didn’t get half the poems??
def needs a reread but i appreciated the things i could understand in here

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Berssenbrugge writes, “my book describes how communicating with star beings can teach us to continue our world through love and grace, communal grace” (99).

It’s such a weird book. It’s very woo-woo, new age sounding at parts. There are cringe moments. There’s aliens, dolphins, insects, the desert, light, space, and human connection throughout (which is cool). It’s not very emotive, it really is a treatise on stars. Here’s the most emotive part imo:

I became very emotional when I realized particles of my body are entangled with every person I’ve ever known, touched or thought of, not only family, but our president, every artist I’ve seen or read, strangers described to me by others or named in their prayers (48)

It’s not surprising that it was a Pulitzer finalist though, because some of the reflections on sight, light, & perception are wild. The whole book is consistent through 100 pages. It really did make me question how it is that I know what I perceive and how different what I perceive is from what someone else may perceive from the same experience.

I recommend it for philosophical poetry-heads who have been starpilled

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly discursive and long-lined poems on stars that really seem to take advantage of the line: it can be oneiric at points and emotional at others. Highly abstract, and yet still moving. An excellent collection.

[nethescurial · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Look inside when you are struggling; every cell in your body emits light."

Not mind > matter, mind = matter. Brief but absolutely lovely and brimming with wisdom, curiosity and kindness. Didn't enjoy it as much as "Empathy" in part because it's not as formally mind-boggling [though this absolutely has its moments] but Berssenbrugge is as expected a major talent and this whole thing is full of gems that articulate a lot of what I've been thinking about from her own POV, which as she repeatedly makes clear is inseparably entangled from mine and everyone else's because we're all made of the same star-stuff. Many would consider this New Age-y, and it is, but I don't consider that a problem, especially when the ideas articulated here are as compassionate and beautifully expressed.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t particularly love this collection, but I think it’s because I wasn’t the intended audience. For those who are really into more spiritual poetry, this is absolutely for you. The poems themselves aren’t terribly lyrical or carry a particular narrative, which might be why this collection didn’t work for me, but it’s clear Berssenbrugge wanted the reader to reflect on her ideas of spirituality and the world around us.

[meowdeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

thought is a form of organized light

what are the forms of things outside of the language i use to describe them

[sheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think a lot about how to communicate ideas (political and scientific and other) concisely, clearly, effectively..... this made me think about that, and how to transmit information, and how we use jargon, and collective cultural knowledge that we associate with words and concepts, and "emotional affect" or whatever.

[sh · Rating 5 out of 5]

love this

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite poetry book I’ve ever read, which is saying a lot as I’ve been reading poetry since I was a small child. I cannot believe I have never heard of this writer before, but now I want to read everything she’s written. I picked this up because of the title at my local library. I think it perhaps just needs different cover art/design, and maybe then it would have all the fame and love it deserves. This book has renewed my love of poetry, it took my breath away and has inspired and invigorated me as a fellow artist and writer.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Thought is a form of organized light”

Incandescent.

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

2020 National Book Award Finalist
2021 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

I may have some difficulty describing this collection of poems, but here goes. At times maddeningly idiosyncratic, distractingly hypnotic, nearly impossible to categorize, this collection is so consistent in its voice and mission that it won me over despite itself and my own cycling urge to resist. On a superficial level, Berssenbrugge herself appears to be the type of person I confess to be perpetually conflicted about – I picture a New Age junkie who has attended so many personal growth retreats that they can no longer speak the common language of the world, but instead passionately reference odd and esoteric touchstones, presenting a being that is either missing the partition between everyday existence and the collective consciousness most of us have – or just missing their sanity.

However, Berssenbrugge zeroes in on one topic that acts like Kryptonite on my cynical resistance: the titular stars in a clear night sky. Her grasp of astronomy and astrophysics becomes evident with clear references to specific stars, planets, the Andromeda galaxy, evolution, quantum physics, dark matter, etc. And a solid treatise it is, organized in four or five poem sections with titles/topics like Consciousness Self-Learns, The Pleiades, Pegasus, Listening, Darkness, Wonder, and Heart.

If you happen to be turned off by any reference to telepathic conversations with animals, extraterrestrial beings (with some of us being their descendants), earth-based spirituality and rituals, then this collection is not for you. What hooked me early on was the poet’s ability to grasp the seemingly ineffable experiences of staring up at a dark night full of stars. Berssenbrugge presents the wonder one feels confronted by our undeniable complete connection to everything else in a possibly infinite universe, then the thoughts and questions that arise: I am so small, almost nothing. Why this life? This planet? What is the source of the power that makes my questions possible? Where do I/we fit in to everything I can now see above me?

Just when I would get a little weirded out, Berssenbrugge would present a completely practical and tangible perspectives worth considering. Ultimately, it almost seems as if Berssenbrugge is the lesson she is teaching:

“The more compassion one has for non-normal experiences of others, the sooner consciousness will shift toward the stars; to him, this means shifting the ethical structure of communication his narrative”.

The inescapable connection of all things perhaps can only be appreciated by the full acknowledgment of their great differences:

“Juxtaposition becomes a blend of consciousness and external event; the more distant the relation, the more emotional, poetic, the perception”.

[pandamans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a work will just hit you, right book, right time. Had to take my time with this one because each line was so concentrated. Peeling the layers like a bomb disposal technician - getting your mind blown - slowly expanding shockwaves - being tugged across the blurred dimensions - through light and dark - sound and imagination. Going to have to gift myself this from a nearby indie shop. Loved it.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise On Stars is a kind of mystical-cosmic-phenomenological-ecopoetics that draws a connection between Western & Eastern philosophies to create a sentence driven poetry filled with beautiful grace & a lightness of being/becoming. Every poem here felt so light & full of a kind of mystic grace that reminds me of Mackey or Duncan. I love the distinctness of the sentence in her work (this is the first book I’ve read by her!) that allows each sentence to feel like a sort of event that corresponds to the gestalt of the poem. Even the book as a whole feels like a gestalt (a word she seems to love deeply!) wherein each poem is an experience that generates a wholeness, a connection to a greater force beyond Mei-mei who is a conduit for these greater celestial bodies that communicate the poem through her.

I’m surprised by some saying she isn’t very lyrical because I was struck by the tender lyricism throughout the entire collection! Berssenbrugge can take rigid & typically cold scientific language & put it into really touching sentences that, again to put them into a sort of feeling, read like parts of a landscape. Something that I can only imagine comes from her living in New Mexico. Having lived there for a short period, I can just see how the expansive plains and landscapes cld be so generative to her sentences that encompass the wholeness of the NM landscapes, to a gestalt of Place. Her poetry really puts into these long, elaborate, and complex sentences a graceful feeling that I have felt when going on walks and trying to really feel connected to a landscape. Its a moment of grace when you can feel the clutter of your thoughts dissipate as you are filled with a communion into place & landscape, it gives me a rush of (a word I continually use!) grace.

Even down to the title, “A Treatise On Stars,” the collection reads incredibly philosophically. There’s a blend of different strands of philosophy and Berssenbrugge connects the various webs of Western & Eastern philosophies together. I am not very well versed in Eastern philosophy but in a conversation she talked about having books open that wld help in creating poems, between science books, Western philosophy, and Eastern philosophy books. But again, I don’t think she tries to rigidly philosophise, she is (of course) much more of a poet than a philosopher & her poetry tries to achieve a sense of communal grace than produce an entire system of philosophy. Overall, she is concerned with a connectednesses of everything on the planet. And this doesn’t just stop at the connectedness of humans, but animals, objects, places, landscape, everything amounts to a gestalt of experience and communion for Berssenbrugge. And she even tries to advance an ethics, an ethics she places at the end which arrives perfectly in place following all of the poetry. Her ethics goes as: “My book describes how communicating with star beings can teach us to continue our world through love and grace, communal grace” (99). There is the grace I am talking about! Her ethics creates a new position of being in the world, a world of connection and relation, but here she wants to create new relations based on love, grace, and care. A new way of being in the world that can feel the communication w/ star being, can commune with the whole ecology of the world. In seeing her w/ poets like Mackey, and even more so Duncan, Mei-mei reads here almost like a romantic type poet, as connected to everything. Think of Duncan in “Poetry, a Natural Thing:” “The poem / feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, / to breed itself, / a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.” Berssenbrugge’s poetry is a “spiritual urgency” and seeing as she is a conduit to which celestial beings generate the poem through her, this is the poem, as a being distinct from its creator, feeding upon her thoughts, feelings, and impulses. However, in a similar way to Duncan and Berssenbrugge’s LANGUAGE orientation, she isn’t the same egotistical and solipsistic poet as a romantic might be. Rather, she forgoes her own personal self within the poetry. The “I” in her poetry is a force beyond herself. It does take from her experiences and comes from her, and her poetry isn’t “impersonal” in the same way a Silliman one might be, but rather she as I isn’t at the foreground of experience and the poem’s creation. The experience she attempts to render is an experience of everything, of the gestalt. That’s why her sentence structure works so well — every sentence is like a part of the whole, a part of this gestalt of everything. And that’s exactly what her ethics strives for, a new relation of connection within life that is based upon care and love. To care for everything on earth and beyond, because we are all connected by celestial bonds that go beyond us.

I truly loved this collection and read it over the day and felt it’s graceful touch and beautiful phenomenological lyricism. I am excited to dive into more of her work!

[kirkesque · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book that presents itself as poetry by having incomplete sentences, lines breaks, and abstract assocations.

This was nominated for a Pulizer? That should teach Robert Temple, José Argüelles, Kawme Adapa, Graham Hancock, and Silviu Sulita that they should have written this Sirius star being talking to ETs books as long form poems. Oh, well, Several of them made their living with the New-age movement anyway.

The combination of newagey peace and tranquility and seeds of science—e.g. “Owls, for example, have one song beyond the range of our hearing, interleaved with multi-dimensional information.”—is a yes and now kind of thing. Yes, owls can make and hear sounds at low frequency (not so good at hearing high frequency sounds), but to say "one song" and "multi-dimensional information" gets into the air pudding kind of newagey crap. I know this, because the conclave of 13 owls I encountered in rural Washington shared their secret wisdom with me. I was going to write a poetry book to share that wisdom with others, but just then my tablet battery died and my pen ran out of ink... true story.

Every bit as true as the let's buy the star beings a Coke and drink it merrily, holding hands, and the world will be peaceful crap Berssenbrugge spouts as if she thought of it in 2020 and decided to share her newly found knowledge with the rest of us. This title falls into the voluminous pile of books with the same idea; it's not the worst, but it is by far not the best.

This book needs to have the Arthur Clark UFO principle applied to it (is there anything about stars and night sky viewing that wouldn't benefit from ACC's wisdom?).
To paraphrase the late Clarke:
1) There is no empirical evidence to suggest UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin.
2) there is no empirical evidence to suggest UFOs are *not* extraterrestrial in origin.
3) If you've never seen an "unidentifiable" object in the night sky, you haven't looked at the night sky for very long.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Dr John Lilly's ghost and my friend Howard the Dolphin are waiting in the sensory deprivation pool. We're going to take some LSD and ketamine and swim through the cosmos with the Sirius star beings made of sound of light. "We are stardust, we are golden. We are billion year old carbon."

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed my brain chemistry.

"I wait to see what I'll recognize, as diffuse sky resolves into points of light and glitter" (3).

"I study how gravity, allure, origin create shape" (8)

"Looking is an innate impulse toward wholeness" (11)

"When no one observes us, not even ourselves, our particles regain their wave aspect" (14)

"I want to learn from what generated the metaphor, the need" (15)

"Awareness creates the duration you experience" (19)

"Light, information, so activated composes a body in the process of coalescence, outcrop of growing, infinite fields...
Nurture belief that your body's infused with the deep intelligence of this information, whose sole purpose is to sustain you" (21)

"There's no need to decide what's true; reality's a learning curve" (22)

"All around are invisible realities where contact may occur" (29)

"I became very emotional when I realized particles of my body are entangled with every person I've ever known, touched or thought of, not only familiar, but our president, every artist I've seen or read, strangers described to me by others or named in their prayers" (48)

"It's how a painting, real in itself, also reveals reality by connecting a blue scarf with a woman's blue eyes, for example" (55)

"When the dolphins left, my heartbeat became erratic, and it hurt...
I went out to film our cove in the dark, and a ball of light appeared on my phone, zipping through the beech trees" (56)

"Joining trust with compassion to elicit space is a form of divination, like finding a lost person by the arc of a falling star" (57)

"Juxtaposition becomes a blend of unconscious and external event; the more distant the relation, the more emotional, poetic, the perception"(60)

"Pain is a vibration; allow it to shine out as part of your content; it's not consciousness itself" (76)

"when I love others "more" than I'm loved, I'm pulled up into the star cloud" (79)

"The more compassion one has for non-normal experiences of others, the sooner consciousness will shift toward the stars; to him, this means shifting the ethical structure of communicating his narrative" (88)

"Early on, I divined that this book already exists in the future" (91)

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truth be told, I am an absolute devotee to Berssenbrugge's poetry. And what consistently draws me to her work is her treatment of complexity. It's complex! And pretty much any subject she takes on is going to be celebrated and stitched into an overwhelming complexity. Like I don't know if it's possible for Berssenbrugge to not take a maximalist approach to any subject. Which is exactly what I read her for. The maximal complexity. The complex mathematics that she discovers on the page whether she's talking about a nest, a girlhood, empathy.

And now the universe. Because that's what A Treatise on the Stars is interested in. I think with an awareness of death or mortality. The mysticism that other readers on this site have mentioned seems to be about connecting someone the poet knows of who has possibly gone beyond their reach. But whatever the motive for observing the universe, I don't know that I've ever read poetry that made me feel the immense fact represented by an entire universe. Like there are spaces on other planets that are like the spaces here on earth. And by spaces, I mean the simplest "space." Look out at a plain, that long drag of land. Those same kinds of plains exist elsewhere. Berrsenbrugge's poem "Consciousness Self-Learns" makes me feel all those different spaces in all the different locations spanning a whole universe. And WTF. What do you do with that?

Berssenbrugge complicates it further. Like how can all those spaces exist, like flat exist, AND they exist in time? Maybe these are pedestrians facts to marvel at, but it's how Berssenbrugge's poems brought them to my attention. And, via those poems, how my ability to perceive any expanse is severely limited. It makes me think of Timothy Morton's hyperobjects. And I like having poetry that makes me consider my relationship with concepts I might pretend to have some awareness of, but which I can't come close to really grasping.

[Leonardo Muñoz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Es interesante como del entramado epistemológico va desarrollando su poesía, pero el protagonismo de lo hippie (extraterrestres, divinidades, interconectividad emotiva, universo con capacidad de emoción, nada demasiado profundo o nuevo siquiera para poder fijar mi atención) me hizo evadir la lectura muchas veces fijándome en uno que otro buen símil, o en la parte final de los poemas que es en sí una conclusión o sea no me fue necesario leer todo el poema para entenderlo, el verso final lo significaba todo: fue una gran decepción.

Aún así, se pueden desprender interesantes citas:
"visibility is like memory"
"When your experience ardently links to an object where you live -husband, tree stone- you try to hold on to the visibility of this object and its location.
Connecting with a geography of sky gives this sense of security, inspiration."
"...and consciousness is mother."
"I mean presence as reciprocity."
"Night elicits, then highlights the tree, as if brightness (day, experience) were a flexible substance being thought into coherence, a mold." (es de las que más me gustaron, obviamente porque puede sobrevivir independiente del significado total del poemario)
"In the same way, the neural grid of an ecosystem continually adjusts to maintain..." (creo que esta es una de las sentencias que más he escuchado en mi vida en el último tiempo, créditos a hippiesgonnahip).

[Neko~chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. HK lended this to me after going to her friend’s reading because “it seems like you like knowledge.” What. Sure I’ll take it. First half i was like ok whatever poet trying to come up with a grand unified theory of physics and second half i was like MAN give me more of this WISDOM. I don’t think this is about the relative awesomenesses of the first and second half and more about the state of mind I was in. Which was kind of the point of these poems actually. Connection involves a conjoining of minds and hearts, something like that anyway. Dependent on time, place, circumstance. Also the format was weird and kept tripping me up the first half bc it was like prose but not prose (just lots of complete sentences separated by paragraph spacing) but by the second half I got the hang of it. Overall I think this is probably pretty good.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not what I expected, a wonderful surprise of really interesting and engaging lyrical poems. I felt as though Berssenbrugge was weaving an intricate web of lyrical constellations that explore the intersection of life, philosophy, the natural world, and technology. To be honest, I felt more drawn to the sound of the language than the content of the poems (probably that’s the point) but still haven’t completely understood all of what I read here. I might have to go and read it again. For poetry lovers, I recommend it—and am eager to know what you might think.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

A Treatise on Stars is really different from most of the poetry I read. The language is really beautiful and evocative, and some of the lines definitely stayed with me. That said, I didn't personally feel a ton of emotional connection with what I was reading. I appreciated it objectively even if it wasn't my preferred style. Would still recommend depending on what the reader was looking for.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's writing style in this poetry collection just stumped me. Each poems is like a collection of complete sentences. It's very much not prose, but my brain kept trying to read it as prose and I just couldn't find my balance with these poems, ending up with them feeling just totally inexplicable. I wanted to love this, and am very intrigued by the topics Berssenbrugge is writing about: stars and aliens and dolphins and consciousness, but I remained fuzzy and lost throughout.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
A perfect set of poetry to read on a cold, quiet day. Berssenbrugge's verse constantly pulled my mind toward all the power and weirdness of space. While I'd often go pages without feeling much at all, there would eventually be clusters of words so beautifully authored that I'd just stop and wonder, losing track of time.

[Henrique Justini · Rating 4 out of 5]

A ultra consciência de Berssenbrugge ultrapassa o discurso simplista new wave de que está tudo interconectado. Sua poesia estética erige um monumento à sensação física e intelectual de não apenas experimentar o Universo, mas ser visitada pelo desconhecido, quando a escuridão deforma tudo tão graciosamente que as silhuetas difusas permitem um portal para um novo mundo.

[Brian Alan S · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t understand it! Poor me! I know reading poetry is hard (I’ve read two other poem collections) - but somehow the poetry collections I’ve read I can understand at least half of what it’s saying. I think poetry should be accessible to everyone. But not this book! This book exists in another dimension!

[Libby Saltsman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ngl I picked this up in a bookstore because the cover caught my eye and many parts of this book were wayyyy above my reading level... but it truly changed the way I think about the world and space and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it :)

[Leonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an unusual book of "poetry," or at least I think that is what the author is writing. These poems are unusual, to say the least, but they provide insights into observation that are very worthwhile.