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Nest
Poetry. Asian-American. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of the very few poets writing in the United States today whose voice and writing style are immediately recognizable. In her new collection, NEST, the medium of her poetry continues to be the sentence. To the formalities of syntax and grammar she adds the structures of domestic architecture, isolation, health, desire, play, and family life. Her writing offers a unique poetics of metaphysics and manners. As always the poetry is sensuous and stunning, and Richard Tuttle has once again designed an arresting cover.
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2003
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180 people want to read
About the author
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
41 books84 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 26, 2022
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness
The boy pulls an animal on a leash.
The house with a red rood rests between two hills.
I can look through its windows to the sea.
His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?
House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theatre.
You don't have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example.
* * *
I'm so pleased to be friends with Maryanne, though I don't understand how she has time for me, with her many friends.
The event of friendship sometimes light her being there, sometimes possibility itself?
Let the sensation, "I listen to her," dissolve in my head; there's no self.
What's called hearer is hearing.
An exemplary listener is determined, who pre-exists my wish to be heard.
She loses this presumed identity through singular beauty, one dividing the other.
Perhaps, "Can you hear me in the night?" exaggerated friendship.
Its featherweight vulnerability offers no counterweight for care through that night?
* * *
People think, at the theatre, an audience is tricked into believing it's looking at life.
The film image is so large, it goes straight into your head.
There's no room to be aware of or interested in people around you.
Girls and cool devices draw audience, but unraveling the life of a real human brings the outsiders.
I wrote before production began, "I want to include all of myself, a heartbroken person who hasn't worked for years, who's simply not dead."
Many fans feel robbed and ask, "What kind of show's about one person's unresolved soul."
* * *
The photograph is handsome of the young man.
Points of likeness puncture the surface of my sight, absent person I bring inside from the interior he inhabits as friend, i.e., innate, strange, in artificial light.
Neighbor by neighbor, a composition not inscribed in framed space, now haunts it.
Piece comes from you (referent) in me, safe house for the virtual as possible, with unlocatable brightness and clarity.
Ground is the beginning, how I remember you by its lack of a basis on which to found, instant replay, afterimage hollowed out in advance, your family who feels secure, their voices.
Don't be afraid to see something you don't want to see.
What if the beginning has no motion, just size, height?
Follow this line.
Your fear of coming to the end is relieved, when you look back through its hollowness.
You see receding x's (joints) forever connect the line to its interior (witness) as what fills a space, what arcs it away?
The boy pulls an animal on a leash.
The house with a red rood rests between two hills.
I can look through its windows to the sea.
His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?
House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theatre.
You don't have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example.
- Permanent Home, 1, pg. 11
* * *
I'm so pleased to be friends with Maryanne, though I don't understand how she has time for me, with her many friends.
The event of friendship sometimes light her being there, sometimes possibility itself?
Let the sensation, "I listen to her," dissolve in my head; there's no self.
What's called hearer is hearing.
An exemplary listener is determined, who pre-exists my wish to be heard.
She loses this presumed identity through singular beauty, one dividing the other.
Perhaps, "Can you hear me in the night?" exaggerated friendship.
Its featherweight vulnerability offers no counterweight for care through that night?
- Kisses from the Moon, 1, pg. 43
* * *
People think, at the theatre, an audience is tricked into believing it's looking at life.
The film image is so large, it goes straight into your head.
There's no room to be aware of or interested in people around you.
Girls and cool devices draw audience, but unraveling the life of a real human brings the outsiders.
I wrote before production began, "I want to include all of myself, a heartbroken person who hasn't worked for years, who's simply not dead."
Many fans feel robbed and ask, "What kind of show's about one person's unresolved soul."
- Audience, 1, pg. 57
* * *
The photograph is handsome of the young man.
Points of likeness puncture the surface of my sight, absent person I bring inside from the interior he inhabits as friend, i.e., innate, strange, in artificial light.
Neighbor by neighbor, a composition not inscribed in framed space, now haunts it.
Piece comes from you (referent) in me, safe house for the virtual as possible, with unlocatable brightness and clarity.
Ground is the beginning, how I remember you by its lack of a basis on which to found, instant replay, afterimage hollowed out in advance, your family who feels secure, their voices.
Don't be afraid to see something you don't want to see.
What if the beginning has no motion, just size, height?
Follow this line.
Your fear of coming to the end is relieved, when you look back through its hollowness.
You see receding x's (joints) forever connect the line to its interior (witness) as what fills a space, what arcs it away?
- Safety, pg. 69
June 30, 2022
I absolutely adored Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's 'Nest.' When first reading her anthology, you are immediately introduced to her abstract use of linguistics, which is established by her central motif of the nest; a home that strives beyond the abstract, and physical shape. The way she exemplifies the innate connection between both her mother tongue and adopted language within her 'nest' is done so beautifully, I felt less like a reader, and more like a participant acting alongside her prose. Overall a wonderful read.
November 5, 2024
“A voice with no no speaking, like the sea, merges with my listening, as if imagining her thinking about me makes me real” (53)
“We were young girls wanting to describe love and to look at it from outer space” (61)
“I embarrassed him by talking and gesturing with no one there./ I spoke to someone with whom I needed to correct things I’d said and done” (65)
“We were young girls wanting to describe love and to look at it from outer space” (61)
“I embarrassed him by talking and gesturing with no one there./ I spoke to someone with whom I needed to correct things I’d said and done” (65)
April 11, 2022
Poems that reference felt sense and bodily perception. A dull hum of constant negotiation with time. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is always unveiling the places where the metaphysical and the spiritual meet.
May 18, 2011
Like a nest, this is a stitched thing with disparate materials, the longer, the more convoluted (more texture), the better.
Like a nest, this collection holds, needs, loves, nurtures the white space of thought, emotion and reader participation and is material but mostly abstract.
Like a nest, this has a restless architecture subject to change, surprise, reframing, and the elements of memory and desire.
Had to often read this aloud to create a slow montage of meaning and association.
This book is demanding on the reader's attention and participation not only through the parataxis but also its unfixed (strangely fixed and refixed?) emotion which creates an overall intimate anonymity with quirky asides.
This book is all in the present tense, something you won't notice, until you notice.
Like a nest, this collection holds, needs, loves, nurtures the white space of thought, emotion and reader participation and is material but mostly abstract.
Like a nest, this has a restless architecture subject to change, surprise, reframing, and the elements of memory and desire.
Had to often read this aloud to create a slow montage of meaning and association.
This book is demanding on the reader's attention and participation not only through the parataxis but also its unfixed (strangely fixed and refixed?) emotion which creates an overall intimate anonymity with quirky asides.
This book is all in the present tense, something you won't notice, until you notice.
March 22, 2012
I found this difficult to follow: the sentence-as-unit-of-organization seems disjointed, jagged, shifting too quickly, especially regarding the organizing concept of "ground." There is too much figurative space between the lines, so that meaning spins apart as a result, instead of holding together. Other books of hers seem more connected, more precisely deployed. For example:
"My body is a film on her preconscious of images she chooses to line conversation.
Its alterity becomes a nuance of our ineluctable situation of futons, dishes, books, with the potential of a destabilized surface of time, no outflow through pink walls.
Atmospheric pressure soaks objects."
"My body is a film on her preconscious of images she chooses to line conversation.
Its alterity becomes a nuance of our ineluctable situation of futons, dishes, books, with the potential of a destabilized surface of time, no outflow through pink walls.
Atmospheric pressure soaks objects."
June 22, 2007
this book can be read over and over. it's a keeper.
January 21, 2008
Boooo ... why do I often feel tone deaf when I read poetry?? The words and images were pretty but I didn't understand a thing =(.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews