A Treatise on Stars

Book excerpt: 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.”