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9781643755922

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""Meditative, analytic, and heartfelt... Christle exudes a refreshing approach to imagination--one that involves reconstructing unlikely human connections... Mesmerizing and at times whimsical, this book brings readers on a journey beyond linear time and across continents, all for the sake of finding comfort and beauty in the garden of words.""--Booklist ""Making sense of trauma. Award-winning poet Christle examines her life, her relationship with her mother, and her affinity with Virginia Woolf in a lyrical memoir... to find meaning and coherence in the 'unknowable parts' of the past. A sensitive chronicle of pain.""--Kirkus Reviews ""A subtle marvel, this book, so many stories at once and all of them brilliantly told. Christle writes of mothers and motherlands and gardens and empires, of writing and seeing and looking again. And Virginia Woolf! Her haunting of these pages is a startling pleasure and provocation, a summons to read everything--our books, our lives--with the wondrous care Christle brings to each word of In the Rhododendrons.""--Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Undertow ""In the Rhododendrons is for anyone who has ever tried to understand their parents. Heather Christle unearths the tangled roots that connect mother to daughter, collapsing time and interrogating the limits and strengths of language and memory through personal and family history as well as through Virginia Woolf's life and work. 'Looking changes what you see, ' Christle writes. Words to live by.""--Michele Filgate, editor of What My Mother and I Don't Talk About and What My Father and I Don't Talk About ""Stunning. I saw her working in a shaft of light, dusting layer after layer off her own life."" --Patricia Lockwood, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel No One Is Talking About This ""I first fell in love with Heather Christle's writing in The Crying Book and her astonishing hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons, cements my devotion. In Christle's narrative of discovery, of pilgrimages and portals, silence and reclamation, and the surprising bonds between a mother, a daughter, and Virginia Woolf, readers will experience a rare and wondrous mind at work. Heart-breaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift.""--Jessamine Chan, New York Times-bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers ""Christle's exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: 'There is a difference between bones and a book, ' she writes, 'but both have at their center a spine.' What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners.""--Kaveh Akbar

"""Christle's exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: 'There is a difference between bones and a book, ' she writes, 'but both have at their center a spine.' What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners.""--Kaveh Akbar"

Author Information

Heather Christle is the author of The Crying Book (Catapult), a New York Times Editor's Choice, Indie Next selection, and national bestseller that was translated into eight languages, awarded the Georgia Book Award for memoir, and adapted for radio by the BBC. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Christle is also the author of four poetry collections including The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Book Award and was adapted into a ballet by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Elle, Granta, London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, and she was recently the recipient of a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction.

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