Paper Crown

by Heather Christle

'In the morning I drink / coffee until I can see / a way to love life / again. It's okay, there's / no difference between flying and thinking / you're flying until / you land. Somehow / I own like six nail clippers / and I honestly can't / remember ever buying / even one.'

Instantly quotable and unique, PAPER CROWN combines the play and humour of Heather's earliest work with the emotional and autobiographical turn of THE CRYING BOOK. In poems such as 'Suggested Donation,' 'Mistake,' and 'Perfect Song,' as well as previously unpublished work, Christle explores familial relationships, the nature of memory, and the outer edges of imagination. Poems from PAPER CROWN have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The White Review. With tenderness and verve, honesty and curiosity, PAPER CROWN continues Christle's lifelong pursuit of understanding the ways that we can move words, and how words in turn can move us.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published August 5, 2025

About the author

Heather Christle is the author of The Crying Book (Catapult), a NYT 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 Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Christle is also the author of four poetry collections including The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), which won the Believer Book Award and was adapted into a ballet by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. In 2021 she was the recipient of a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction. Born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire to a Merchant Mariner from North Dakota and an artist from London, Christle spent her teen years and early twenties immersed in the Boston punk scene. She attended Tufts University, graduating in 2004. After receiving her MFA from UMass Amherst in 2009, she was a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University from 2009-11, and has also taught at UT Austin and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her partner (poet and writer Christopher DeWeese), their child, and two cats.

Reviews

[Kozbi BC]

So lovely and creative!

[Grace Anne]

linguistic play and innovation and surprise and Christle at her best. only sad because I want more

[Taylor Franson-Thiel]

Hello one of my new favorite poets. Delightful voice. Love

[Clelia]

I don't read poetry collections very often but I really enjoyed this one

[Claire g]

Honestly great….there is something cosmic abt it

[Gee]

a handful of bangers. what she does which is very interesting is she doesn’t use any metaphors, similes, no nothing, but instead almost every poem is her presenting something absurd as if it’s really happening and then playing inside that space (like: “i run the deer’s archive./ it’s very light work” or “two men share one tooth. from / one tooth the men / predict the world.” kind of mythological, magical realism at play here. i really like that as an idea but it got old tbh. kinda like mary ruefle in that it felt like she was just flexing what kind of absurd situations she could present…said with respect. its a matter of taste i spose. just not my thing. (meanwhile 90% chance that if you took all the punctuation out i would be like “this is pure, raw, human genius!!!” i just hate when the poem ends with a period idk)

[iris]

heather christle is genius at endings. other things too but wow every poem sticks its landing

[Ethan Altshul]

A wonderfully inventive book

[Liz ardeez]

I LOVE these poems. And when I heard her read some a few weeks ago something unlocked within me. I understand poetry now. And that I will never understand it.

[Adelaide Rosene]

💜👑

[H]

"The deer are awake./ Is one pregnant?/ If they kept diaries/ the first entry would/ read: Was born/ Was licked/ Tried walking" (1)

"If the glowing door/ were to appear I'd/ tell you all about it./ I would miss my life" (5)

"Rooms invaded the world/ centuries before me./ A few inches over/ a small doom took form" (24)

"I have several imaginary problems/ to which I turn in times of great need./ The penny where my heart should be...It can get lonely out here/ in the cloud/How much/ would it take to get you to look up/ and say--I don't know-- my name?" (29)

"how the pain is immense and replaced/ with a stubborn understanding/ that one cannot go backwards,/ though one ought to go backwards,/ and that is how a brain/ begins to terrorize itself" (47)

"I breathed in for 12 seconds and out for 8/ and meanwhile I reached an infinitely/ small moment I was exactly twice/ as old as you or vice versa but now/ we are drifting farther apart then ever before/ and that is sad but not without value/ like an amateur crime reenactment/ in which all but the victim is wrong" (48)

"Is a name meant to fit over or inside or/ next to? I find when I do wear my name/ it boings from my head on some kind/ of antenna and our movements/ are related but do not match./ The sun has burned into my back/the shape of a window and now/ I can see through it to the sky" (56)

"Is it sad that a robin/--in order to be born--/ must break that pretty/ egg? Don't answer that!/ An unanswered question/ remains whole" (63)

"Thought *I am still a bell waiting to be a rung*/ Thought *I would be happy to be rung*" (66)

[Cheryl]

Perfect Song

I remember walking through the morning
after a night of heavy snow and drink
with headphones on and they played
me the most perfect song: no one
was awake and I was hungover
young as clean as a piano
I thought and at any moment
someone might fall in love with me
I was that woven into the electric
cold bright air and for weeks
after I went through the album
in search of the song but could not
find it and later much later I saw
that what I had taken to be the song
was in fact the joyous concordance
of a moment that would not come again.

accessible poetry about everyday things.

Excerpts:

In the morning I drink coffee
until I can see a way to love
life again. It’s okay, there’s no
difference between flying and
thinking you’re flying until you land.

I raise my head and am astonished by the window’s absolute and complicated green, the opposite of the wrong suitcase’s impassive empty space. These are my hands with nothing in them.

The birds are multiplying. No one in front now, no one needed. They’ve stitched themselves into a wave

Every leaf has been pulled into sight. If I look up I will have to take them in. There is no order. They each have a name.

Someone says No one cares a whit for me and someone else says I care a whit for you and someone else still says ‘Whit’ is a variation on ‘wight’ meaning ‘thing’ or ‘person’ and the second person’s reassurance collapses into itself — I care a person for a person — the way the solar system eventually will, some bright and then dark day.

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

Heather Christle's first poetry collection in a decade and it *might* be my favorite one yet. "The Tooth" is an all-timer for me, a poem I return to often, and I was thrilled to finally see it in print. I was also fortunate enough to hear Christle read from this book earlier this summer in Chicago, where she encouraged people at the venue to come closer to the stage, sit on the floor, and if they showed her proof of having ordered her book, she'd tell them her favorite joke. 10/10, no notes.

[Dyson Kona]

i loved. writing away from sorrow towards weirdness and always looking for an exit. very true to a poem being a space. i give 5 stars because i loved it but i also gave the essential 5 stars and now i realize that stars don't matter. the shapes of them do one hundred emoji. half my reviews are my disagreements with goodreads.

[Christopher Deweese]

This book is amazing.

[Sarah Bean]

I fear poems this abstract tend to be hit or miss for me. “My Love You Died in my Dream Last Night,” “Some Ideas on the Novel” and “Mistake” are some of my favorite poems I’ve ever read though.

[Emily Brown]

love heather christle, includes my fave poem of hers ("the tooth").

not really a totally cohesive collection but i'm jazzed it exists.

[Chanel Chapters]

Roadkill, but make it mistaken misplaced grief.

[Nomax]

can't recommend it enough

[Laura]

Really love the word play .
Very creative and makes you think about how words and their meanings operate in our lives .

[Hannah Einhorn]

there was some structural dissonance with the way my brain usually flows through poetry. need to retry soon.