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
'A striking celebration of risk and beauty' Kit Fan, Guardian
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

HEATHER CHRISTLE is the author of the literary memoir In the Rhododendrons (2025), The Crying Book (2019), and four poetry collections, including The Trees The Trees (Corsair Poetry, 2019). She is an Associate Professor at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Granta, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Poetry.