Published in 2019
209 pages
3 hours and 55 minutes
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). The Crying Book is her first work of nonfiction. 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.
What is this book about?
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.
