Description
'A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book' Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias'Spellbinding and propulsive' Leni Zeumas, author of Red Clocks' The Crying Book is a rigorous and urgent work but it reads like an intimate gift' Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a WolfA DAZZLING MEDITATION ON TEARSIn this symphonic work of non-fiction, Heather Christle explores the most human of crying. What are tears made of? Why do people cry? And why is this common, crucial act so rarely discussed? Christle unpacks the biological reasons for tears and investigates the influence of crying on art, politics, feminism, race and culture, all while opening up the intimate story of her own tears - from the suicide of her close friend to her family's history of depression, to her pregnancies, both planned and unplanned.In these pages, we meet a feminist artist who designs a gun that shoots frozen tears. A moth that takes sustenance from feeding on the tears shed by other animals. And beautifully impractical devices for dealing with grief such as the 'lachrymatory', an ancient receptacle into which it was hoped 'a mourner could let fall her hot tears'. While Christle enchants us with poetic snippets on these subjects, a powerful investigation begins to accrue, examining how the history of tears is tied up with racist violence, with the stigma of mental illness, and with the ways in which glib contemporary images of motherhood fail to reckon with how rich and complicated is actually is.Brilliant, witty and achingly honest, Christle's book creates a mosaic of science, history, culture and personal experience to find new ways of understanding life and loss. The Crying Book is a deeply intimate tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears - and the unexpected resilience of joy.Honest, intelligent, rapturous and surprising, The Crying Book is a poignant, personal tribute to the astonishing strangeness of tears and the startling resilience of joy.
About the Author
Heather Christle is author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm (2009); The Trees The Trees (2011), which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing (2012); and Heliopause (2015). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, will be out in November 2019. A former creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University, Christle’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and many other journals. She was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and earned a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught at Wittenberg University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Guelph, and other institutions. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
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