Paper Crown

(Paperback)

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Description

'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.'

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.

Reviews

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
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
Heather Christle's Paper Crown anticipates times when inner visions match the outer world * Library Journal *

Author Bio

HEATHER CHRISTLE is the author of the literary memoir In the Rhododendrons (2025), The Crying Book (2019), and four poetry collections, including The Trees The Trees (Corsair Poetry, 2019). 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.