RaveAGNI... to read a Berssenbrugge poem is to experience the juxtaposition between the certainty of a voice (not always certainly hers) and the spiraling, unfolding quality it takes on as it persists ... we feel the power of intention ... The sentences...hold one’s attention as much by clarity as by confusion. Which is not to say the reader should expect a scientifically conventional argument about stars—these poems are as difficult to summarize as Berssenbrugge’s previous work. In A Treatise on Stars, though, that difficulty comes from a delicacy of repetition and variation—we stay much longer with a single idea, and slowly the world expands around it: our experience of stars, and then gradually how their relationship to space, time, and feeling changes us ... there is surprise at work. An electricity builds between the sentences—how we move forward and back; what we expect will come next and what actually follows—adding to the extraordinary sense of anticipation that Berssenbrugge manipulates across the collection ... There is also a spirituality here ... The crackling charge of Berssenbrugge’s language holds us.
