The crying book

Format:

Book

Title:

The crying book

Author:

Christle, Heather, 1980- author.

ISBN:

9781948226448

Publication:

New York : Catapult, [2019]

Physical Description:

vi, 200 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Summary:

"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."-- Provided by publisher

Subject(s):

Tears.

Crying.

American poetry -- 21st century.

Poetry, Modern -- 21st century.

Poetry -- 21st century.

Genre:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	814.6 Christle 2019	Searching... Unknown
Searching... McMinnville Public Library	814.6 Christle	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Silver Falls Library	814 CHRISTLE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears--exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." --Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias

"Spellbinding and propulsive--the map of a luminous mind in conversation with books, songs, friends, scientific theories, literary histories, her own jagged joy, and despair. Heather Christle is a visionary writer." --Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression ( The New York Times Book Review ).

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women's tears play in racist violence.

Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle's investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Author Notes

Heather Christle is the author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm ; The Trees The Trees , which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing ; and Heliopause . Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker , London Review of Books , Poetry , and many other journals. She teaches creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. The Crying Book is her first book of nonfiction.

Reviews (2)

Kirkus Review

An eclectic reflection on human waterworks.Award-winning poet Christle (Creative Writing/Emory Univ. Heliopause, 2015, etc.) pushes the boundaries of her genre with this hybrid approach to tears. Fusing poetry with lyric essay and a significant amount of research, the author sheds new light on the basic, universal phenomenon of crying. Beyond factnamely, that at one point or another, fluid has leaked from everyone's eyessome may wonder what more there is to know. This book provides the definitive answer: plenty. There are no chapters. Rather, in one long reflection, divided into small, partial-page sections, Christle examines such elements as pretend grief (she cites poet Chelsey Minnis, who calls it "cry-hustling"); "white tears," (a Caucasian person's response to suddenly realizing the enormity of systemic racism); and the differences between the three types of tears: basal (lubricant), irritant (a response to a foreign substance), and psychogenic (emotional). She also considers the distinction between crying and weeping"crying is louder; weeping is wetter"and introduces readers to professional mourners and lachrymatories, small vessels in which tears are stored. Of particular interest is Christle's inquiry into the connections among grief, gender, and anger. She wonders "whether men kill to create an occasion for the grief they already feel." The author infuses these tear-related themes with prose about her personal experiences, including her own treatment for depression and her staggering grief over a dear friend's suicide. The format of the book lends itself to either quick consumption or measured contemplation; sections range from one sentence to a little more than a page. Though this structure could make for a choppy text, the transitions between her various sources and streams of thought are mostly seamless, providing a pleasurable, even restful reading experience. The narrative is saturated with significant threads of sadness, but they don't overwhelm. Rather, the unconventional format, combined with the author's vast survey of the topic, provides fascinating food for thought.A surprisingly hopeful meditation on why we shed tears. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Poet Christle set out to make a map of every place she had cried. Instead, she ended up with this exploration of tears throughout history, in art and literature, and in her own life. Especially fragile after a dear friend's suicide and her own impending motherhood, Christle begins by chronicling her own grief and depression but quickly expands beyond herself to consider instances of crying in art, primarily in poetry. She includes historical information about the study of tears, devices used to collect tears (yes, really; they're called lachrymatories), and the role of white women's tears in oppression. Written in short bursts of information, few being longer than a page, and wildly jumping around thematically, The Crying Book reads like poetry and is reminiscent in style of Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2005). The cumulative effect hits the mark, and readers are sure to be moved to tears themselves. This is a lovely meditation on life and death through the lens of tears, both those spurred by grief and those by joy.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2010 Booklist