Heather Christle's Blog

luthienne:

Heather Christle, from The Crying Book

[Text ID: Most crying happens at night. People cry out of fatigue. But how horrible it is to hear someone say, “She’s just tired!” Tired, yes, certainly, but just? There is nothing just about it.]

Couple years ago I heard Zachary Schomburg read this poem and thought “that is an astute statement about crying I would like to borrow for The Crying Book,” and yesterday I got those galleys and today I got this beauty in the mail and I am liking the timing of the postal system/world.

You will not be surprised if I tell you blurbs make me tear up. Thank you Esmé Weijun Wang and Noy Holland, two brilliant humans I can’t quite believe were reading on the other side of these pages.

The new and final issue of FIELD opens with two poems I wrote, including this one, in which I love my sister dearly. I’m so grateful for the years of work that have brought 100 issues of poetry into the world. What a long and fruitful season!

Very excited to share The Crying Book’s German cover! It’s been a joy corresponding with Sabine Hübner, who’s translating the book for Hanser, and who asks the most clarifying questions. This edition will be out November 5, the same day it comes out from Catapult.

New poem up at London Review of Books! The title is borrowed from William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” It’s a question I ask myself a lot.

The Crying Book has a (gorgeous, smart, wonderful) cover, thanks to the skill and vision of Nicole Caputo at Catapult. I’m feeling tremendously lucky and grateful. You can preorder it now. Here’s what it’s like, in book-jacket-speak:

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

bansheelit:

There is nothing in my house.
I sit on the floor by myself.
I am acquainted with myself
and the sunlight as it’s leaving.
I am no smaller. It’s only
a feeling. A cellar beneath
me. Stones beneath that. Can
anyone fathom the weather.
I make an X on my arm
with my nail. And then another.
This is one way to decimate time.
The sunlight collects me. That
part is clear. But to what
end. And for which nation.

[from issue #7 – autumn/winter 2018]

About the Author
Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections: Heliopause and What is Amazing, both published by Wesleyan University Press, and The Trees The Trees and The Difficult Farm, both published by Octopus Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer and elsewhere. She is currently writing a non-fiction book about crying.

I don’t have the words (or music, or movements) to describe the sensation of seeing the immense combined talents that brought poems from The Trees The Trees to new life onstage at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, so here’s a video instead.

From an interview about revision with the excellent Ben Purkert at Guernica