Author: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Type of Literature: Poetry

Literary Current: Contemporary American Poetry / Language Poetry / Eco-poetry

A Treatise on Stars

In A Treatise on Stars, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge brings together astronomy, philosophy, perception, and consciousness in a poetry that resists linear explanation. Rather than treating stars as distant objects, she explores them as sites where knowledge, imagination, and existence intersect. Throughout the collection, uncertainty becomes a condition of openness rather than limitation, while beings are understood through the relationships they form instead of as isolated entities. Scientific ideas—including light, entropy, and fractals—are not decorative references but conceptual tools that deepen reflections on perception, interconnectedness, and the nature of reality.

Berssenbrugge's patient, meditative style invites slow reading, allowing meanings to emerge gradually through fluid syntax and deliberately unfinished images. Imagination functions not as escape but as a space of becoming, where inner and outer worlds continually shape one another. Rather than offering conclusions, A Treatise on Stars proposes a relational way of seeing in which science and poetry, self and cosmos, thought and experience remain inseparable, revealing new constellations of meaning with each return to the text.