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The Crying Book by Heather Christle
£9.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781472154712
Published:
04 Feb 2021
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
208 pages
Dimensions:
196x124x22mm
Weight:
0.170kgs
Author:
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. Told in short, poetic snippets, 'The Crying Book' delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women's agency - or lack of agency - in everyday life.
'A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book' Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
'Spellbinding and propulsive' Leni Zeumas, author of Red Clocks
'The Crying Book is a rigorous and urgent work but it reads like an intimate gift' Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
A DAZZLING MEDITATION ON TEARS
In this symphonic work of non-fiction, Heather Christle explores the most human of behaviours: crying. What are tears made of? Why do people cry? And why is this common, crucial act so rarely discussed? Christle unpacks the biological reasons for tears and investigates the influence of crying on art, politics, feminism, race and culture, all while opening up the intimate story of her own tears - from the suicide of her close friend to her family's history of depression, to her pregnancies, both planned and unplanned.
In these pages, we meet a feminist artist who designs a gun that shoots frozen tears. A moth that takes sustenance from feeding on the tears shed by other animals. And beautifully impractical devices for dealing with grief such as the 'lachrymatory', an ancient receptacle into which it was hoped 'a mourner could let fall her hot tears'. While Christle enchants us with poetic snippets on these subjects, a powerful investigation begins to accrue, examining how the history of tears is tied up with racist violence, with the stigma of mental illness, and with the ways in which glib contemporary images of motherhood fail to reckon with how rich and complicated is actually is.
Brilliant, witty and achingly honest, Christle's book creates a mosaic of science, history, culture and personal experience to find new ways of understanding life and loss. The Crying Book is a deeply intimate tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears - and the unexpected resilience of joy.
Honest, intelligent, rapturous and surprising, The Crying Book is a poignant, personal tribute to the astonishing strangeness of tears and the startling resilience of joy.
About the Author: 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 non-fiction.
| Number of pages | 208 |
|---|
We will despatch your order as quickly as we can. If, for whatever reason, a product is out of stock we will contact you to discuss the likely delivery time or an alternative product.
| First Item | 2 Items & Over | |
|---|---|---|
| UK | £3.75 | £5.00 |
| EU | £15.00 | £30.00 |
| USA & Canada | £30.00 | £50.00 |
| Rest of the World | £45.00 | £60.00 |
| Collect in Store | free | free |
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