The poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge wrote famously with the long line, a signal of her interest in visuality and the sight/site line, a horizontality that embodies the social and visual landscape she wants to examine. As I see it, the line actually functions as a sleeping body that is the site for and from consideration. I’ve always been curious about the way the line “reads” aurally, and so I’ve included this audio recording of Berssenbrugge reading for WPS1, a radio program that also included an interview of Berssenbrugge by Charles Bernstein (2006). The link to the audio file is here (hosted on PennSound):

(I was not able to upload the MP3 File to Commons.)

I wanted to also mention that for me, Berssenbrugge has been important in thinking through questions about the nature of “home”; she seems to find a “home” in language through estrangement, mentioning elsewhere her feelings of alienation in relation to the Chinese language, the “language of her mother.” Her work demands a suspension of the critical impulse to understand, while at the same time asking for a sustained consideration of the social and political implications of different modes, or maybe temporalities, of perception.