Heather Christle

«Se dice que quizá lloramos cuando fracasa el lenguaje, cuando las palabras ya no pueden transmitir adecuadamente nuestro dolor». La poeta Heather Christle desvela la historia íntima de sus lágrimas —desde el suicidio de un amigo hasta sus embarazos o la historia de depresión en su familia— para desentrañar las razones biológicas del llanto e investigar su influencia en el arte, la cultura y el feminismo. En estas páginas Christle nos descubre a una artista que diseña una pistola de lágrimas heladas; a una polilla que se alimenta de las lágrimas de otros animales y artilugios para lidiar con el duelo como el «lacrimatorio», un recipiente de la Antigüedad donde el «doliente pudiese verter sus lágrimas recién derramadas». La autora nos hechiza con sus fragmentos poéticos y explora cómo la historia de las lágrimas se enlaza con la violencia racista o el estigma de la enfermedad mental. Brillante, ingenioso y sincero, El libro de las lágrimas es una celebración de la poesía y un particular homenaje a la fascinante rareza de las lágrimas.

For readers of Also a Poet, Orwell’s Roses, and My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers—as well as the legions of Virginia Woolf fanatics—the acclaimed poet and author of The Crying Book crafts a deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir about her mother, Woolf, and the transformative power of writing. When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.   On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Heather Christle’s mother revealed a shocking secret from her she had been sexually assaulted as a young girl growing up in London, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.   Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's "birthday hill" in Kew Gardens, the tourist-ified homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf—both famously depressed in life and exuberant on the page—and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.   Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. It is also a book unlike any other, and one that will send readers down rabbit holes of their own.

Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying―from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence. Told in short, poetic snippets, The Crying Book delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women’s agency―or lack of agency―in everyday life. Christle’s gift is the freshness of her voice and honesty of her approach, both of which create an intimacy with readers as she explores a human behavior broadly experienced but rarely questioned. A beautiful tribute to the power of crying, and to working through despair to tears of joy.

The Difficult Farm is where you’ll find surprising jolts of the sweetest kindness delivered via poetry that’s new, urgent, blessed, beautiful, careful, tenacious, a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all. When I read a poem by Heather Christle I’m awed. – Dara Wier This is serious. Heather Christle’s poems in The Difficult Farm are dancing with the mysteries surrounding our condition and enlivening our language in the process. Christle’s poems are magical but they’re too busy to tell you that. These poems run and jump and float over an ever-evolving landscape where what’s at work is the serious business of discovery. In this book you will make discoveries of all kinds. These poems will shoot you to the moon, but which moon? – James Tate

In THE TREES THE TREES, the follow-up to Heather Christle's acclaimed first collection, THE DIFFICULT FARM, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.