''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 WolfA DAZZLING MEDITATION ON TEARSIn 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.

''Heather Christle''s poems may well be one of the places readers turn when they want to know what it was like to be young and paying attention in the early 21st century . . . Her poems are wide awake'' Mark DotyIn The Trees The Trees, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.

''IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It''s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art''s most urgent living practitioners'' Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.On a recent visit to London''s Kew Gardens, Christle''s mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather''s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.Her private, British mother''s revelation - a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship - propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother''s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England''s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family''s ''birthday hill'' in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother''s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.

''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 WolfA DAZZLING MEDITATION ON TEARSIn 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.

''Heather Christle''s poems may well be one of the places readers turn when they want to know what it was like to be young and paying attention in the early 21st century . . . Her poems are wide awake'' Mark DotyIn The Trees The Trees, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.

''IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It''s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art''s most urgent living practitioners'' Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.On a recent visit to London''s Kew Gardens, Christle''s mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather''s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.Her private, British mother''s revelation - a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship - propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother''s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England''s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family''s ''birthday hill'' in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother''s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.