Loads of Learned Lumber

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Heather Christle, _The Crying Book_

 CHRISTLE'S BOOK-LENGTH ESSAY bears an accurate title, as it does contain a lot of information about tears and draws on technical studies of why and how people cry, but it is "about" crying in the way that William Gass's On Being Blue is "about" the color. That is, crying is the book's reliable hub, but the spokes are what keeps it turning and kept me reading.

Among the spokes: Christle's pregnancy, and the birth and infancy of her daughter; Christle's mother's experience of electro-shock therapy as a young woman, and the similar experiences of Sylvia Plath as fictionalized in The Bell Jar; a class with Deborah Digges that Christle took in college, in which Plath was one of the four poets studied; Christle's learning that the death of one friend, the poet Bill Cassidy, was a suicide through the reading of a poem by another friend, Mathias Svalina; Margery Kempe, whose loud and uncontrollable weeping was such a headache to her fellow pilgrims; crying in movies, crying at movies.

The book reminded me of Christle's poetry in all sorts of good ways--its surprising juxtapositions, their logical felt more than understood; its peculiar paradoxical levitation, seemingly walking a inch or two above the ground while carrying genuinely heavy burdens.

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