Empathy

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Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new preface for this edition, "I believe we're born with the capacity for sensing emotional nuance around us. Not only of beloved persons nearby, but of people we don't know--globally--and also of animals, plants, clouds, rocks." In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element--water, fog--one place--tundra, desert mesa--one animal--the swan--as the locus of human illumination and desire. Jackson MacLow wrote that the poetry in this collection "moves from 'inner' phenomena to ones coming from the 'external' world and back again with breathtaking evenness" and that the poet herself "is neither 'objectivist' nor 'subjectivist' but a poet of the whole consciousness."