Paper Crown

‘[Heather Christle is] among the small handful of authors whose books I reflexively, half-consciously reach toward whenever I need inspiration, consolation, delight. Nobody thinks like her’ Kaveh Akbar, Electric Literature

‘This is a stunning book’ Jericho Brown

Paper Crown is Heather Christle’s first new collection of poems in over a decade.

Throughout these exuberant poems, Christle conjures moments when the world’s events – a child’s words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinners with friends – alight themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity.

With tenderness and verse, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognise that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem.

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