Heather Christle, _Heliopause_

 I WAS LOOKING for The Crying Book on my shelves last week, in anticipation of Christle's forthcoming book on Virginia Woolf, and came across this, her fourth book of poems. Have I read this? I asked myself. Turns out that I have not, even though it came out in 2015. Well, now is the time.

"Heliopause" is "the boundary of the heliosphere," according to the online dictionary I consulted, and the "heliosphere" is defined as "the region of space, encompassing the solar system, in which the solar wind has a significant influence." We are, then, dealing with boundaries, with the liminal, with zones where one place becomes another place. 

The word shows up in its literal sense in the sequence "Dear Seth," a group of verse epistles. "Neil Armstrong died / the same day Voyager finally reached the limit / of our solar system," Christle notes in one letter, then adds in the next: 

     I am still thinking about space
For a long time they did not know
if Voyager had crossed the heliopause
and we lived
     in the strange interim
of an event perhaps having occurred
in the uncertainty of something 
having happened

Those moments that distinguish a "before" from an "after" recur throughout the book, like the deaths of friends ("Poem for Bill Cassidy"). The poems are often set in the "during," when we are no longer "before" but not yet "after." One of the longer pieces is an erasure poem based on the transcripts of Neil Armstrong's communications with mission control as he took humankind's first steps on the moon, for instance, but we also have that more familiar and longer-lasting watershed, pregnancy: ("Tomorrow the baby hits the size / of a banana"). 

The theme is a good fit for Christle. The shorter poems in the collection reminded me a lot of her earlier work and her ability to somehow situate her poems between whimsy and terror. This is how "Keep in Shape" ends:

               See how
the weather does not write me
never phones
          I can't pretend
that doesn't hurt
               but I can
pretend I'm burning down my home

The little joke about the weather as bad boyfriend or negligent child turns into a confession of feeling and then into a vision of destruction...that is the echt Christle note, right there. Where are we? We are all over the map, all at once...that's where we are. I hope her (deserved) success as a prose writer does not mean she won't be publishing more poetry.