‘[Heather Christle is] among the small handful of authors whose books I reflexively, half-consciously reach toward whenever I need inspiration, consolation, delight. Nobody thinks like her’ Kaveh Akbar, Electric Literature
‘This is a stunning book’ Jericho Brown
Paper Crown is Heather Christle’s first new collection of poems in over a decade.
Throughout these exhuberant poems, Christle conjures moments when the world’s events – a child’s words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinners with friends – alight themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity.
WIth tenderness and verse, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognise that the day going on around them could very well be its own 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
‘This is a stunning book’ Jericho Brown
Paper Crown is Heather Christle’s first new collection of poems in over a decade.
Throughout these exhuberant poems, Christle conjures moments when the world’s events – a child’s words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinners with friends – alight themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity.
WIth tenderness and verse, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognise that the day going on around them could very well be its own 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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Reviews
Heather Christle's Paper Crown anticipates times when inner visions match the outer world
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."
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.