Heather Christle, Paper Crown

 

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

Oh, I am delighted to see a new poetry title by American poet Heather Christle, Paper Crown (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025), her first in a decade, although she’s published two works of non-fiction during that time: The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019) and In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin, 2025), of which I am but one title behind. Following her prior collections The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), What is amazing (Wesleyan, 2012) [see my review of such here] and Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], the poems in Paper Crown offer Christle’s usual tight lyric narratives—lines one could bounce a quarter off of, perhaps—but with a bit more breath between lines, almost as a kind of open comfort in the way she approaches her lyric. As she writes mid-way through the opening poem, “Suggested Donation”: “Somehow / I own like six nail clippers / and I honestly can’t / remember ever buying / even one. My sister / came to visit and / saw them in a small / wooden bowl. I / heard her laughing in / the bathroom. I hope / she never dies.” These poems offer counterpoint between lightness and dark, acknowledging how dark the dark might get, but not quite allowing it to overwhelm, held back by an optimism, or even a pragmatism, that can’t be stopped, even amid dreams, surreal narratives and childhood recollection. “Thr is a reason / for everything says the terrible book,” she writes, mid-way through “Description of a Work in Progress,” “and there is no comfort in that / or anywhere. I checked. I am paid / to make the index.”

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. “I did not know it was possible (your constancy / being among your chief characteristics),” opens the short piece “My Love You Died in My Dream Last Night,” “and I, bereft, could not think of how to tell our child / and so kindly you got up and together we admired // the suit in which you chose to be buried / and your ongoing good humor.” These are smart and clear-headed poems, providing a subtlety that I deeply appreciate. Pay attention, here. Or you might just miss something. Or, as the poem “To the Brim” writes, mid-way through: “What pins // me to my seat is the dread / of having darkneess / dragged from me the way // the executioner would take / entrails from a person / still alive, say see?”