Overview

First poetry collection in a decade from acclaimed author of The Crying Book Since Heather Christle published her last poetry collection a decade ago, her nonfiction works The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons have found her readers around the world. Paper Crown marks Christle's exuberant return to her home genre, in which she combines the imagination of her earliest poetry with the personal elements of her more recent prose. These poems conjure moments when the world's events (a child's words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinner with friends) align themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity. With tenderness and verve, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognize that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem. [sample poem] Mistake For years I have seen dead animals on the highway and grieved for them only to realize they are not dead animals they are t shirts or bits of blown tire and I have found myself with this excess of grief I have made with no object to let it spill over and I have not known where to put it or keep it and then today I thought I know I can give it to you

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9780819501691

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Reviews

""Heather Christle's Paper Crown renders the precise darts and folds of lyric attention, revealing poetry to be a timekeeping as intimate and exact as that of perfect friendship or the pineal gland: 'The click of time saying yes.'""--Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles ""I have never before read a book like Paper Crown. In it, Heather Christle opens the doors of her mind as if it is a library where we are welcome to roam so long as we understand that 'If pages fall from high / enough they can take down a house.' Seemingly domestic in their sly meditations, always exultant in their view of the natural world, these poems clarify the mind of one fully aware of the fear and despair that dwells in and around us in the midst of our desires whether they be erotic or artistic or the desire to be awed by a stunning book. This is a stunning book. I am stunned.""--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition ""Heather Christle's Paper Crown (Wesleyan Univ., Aug.) anticipates times when inner visions match the outer world.""--Library Journal

""Heather Christle's Paper Crown (Wesleyan Univ., Aug.) anticipates times when inner visions match the outer world.""--Library Journal ""Christle's chief subjects are less reality or the imagination than the human faculties that knead one into the other--grief, whimsy, worry, dreaming, and of course poetry, which (like the titular paper crown) folds a flat, everywhere-found medium into a kingdom you can live in.""--Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub ""Heather Christle's Paper Crown renders the precise darts and folds of lyric attention, revealing poetry to be a timekeeping as intimate and exact as that of perfect friendship or the pineal gland: 'The click of time saying yes.'""--Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles ""I have never before read a book like Paper Crown. In it, Heather Christle opens the doors of her mind as if it is a library where we are welcome to roam so long as we understand that 'If pages fall from high / enough they can take down a house.' Seemingly domestic in their sly meditations, always exultant in their view of the natural world, these poems clarify the mind of one fully aware of the fear and despair that dwells in and around us in the midst of our desires whether they be erotic or artistic or the desire to be awed by a stunning book. This is a stunning book. I am stunned.""--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

Author Information

HEATHER CHRISTLE is the author of the literary memoir In the Rhododendrons (2025), The Crying Book (2019), and four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Granta, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Poetry.

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