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Paper Crown

Heather Christle

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'[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

'A striking celebration of risk and beauty' Kit Fan, Guardian

Paper Crown is Heather Christle's first new collection of poems in over a decade.

Throughout these exuberant 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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Praise for Paper Crown

  • 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.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."

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Heather Christle

Heather Christle

Heather Christle is the author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm; The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing; and Heliopause. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, London Review of Books, Poetry and many other journals. She teaches creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. The Crying Book is her first book of non-fiction.

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