Paper Crown

Heather Christle

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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

Book Details

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publish Date: Aug 5th, 2025
Pages: 80
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.89in - 6.10in - 0.27in - 0.30lb
EAN: 9780819501691
Categories: • Subjects & Themes - Political & Protest• Women Authors• American - General

About the Author

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.

Praise for this book

"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

"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

"These are curious poems, rich with imagination and outreach, and I'm fond of Christle's lyric declarations, blending together an array of threads into a finely woven narrative, precise and clear-minded and quietly intimate... These are smart and clear-headed poems, providing a subtlety that I deeply appreciate."--rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog

"This new volume is as peculiar and delightful as her cleverest work, while as urgent and resonant as her most sagacious--yet no poem seems over-worked... With a pure, liquid intelligence, Christle's poems enact how thinking feels when we're at our best, our most open, our most free. In these pages, you wear the crown."--Dobby Gibson, Rain Taxi