What Is Amazing

By Heather Christle

Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819572783

Heather Christle

Heather Christle is the author of the four full-length poetry collections, including Heliopause, published by Wesleyan in March 2015. Her previous books are What is Amazing, The Difficult Farm, and The Trees The Trees, which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and other publications. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. She is the web editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Christle received her BA in English from Tufts University and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Book preview

what is amazing

WESLEYAN POETRY

HEATHER CHRISTLE

what is amazing

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2012 Heather Christle

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed & typeset in Seria Sans by Eric M. Brooks

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christle, Heather, 1980–

What is amazing / Heather Christle.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8195-7277-6 (cloth: alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-8195-7278-3 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3603.H755W43     2012

811'.6—dc23           2011046139

5  4  3  2  1

for my parents

CONTENTS

i

The Seaside!

Self-Portrait with Fire

Teamwork Should Come from the Soul

If You Go into the Woods You Will Find It Has a Technology

People Are a Living Structure Like a Coral Reef

Moss Does Not Love Other Moss

To Kew by Tram

No Light and No Hands

An Activity

How Like an Island

More of Form Is More of Content

Talk Radio

Taxonomy of That November

Way out in the Country

I’ll Be Me and You Be Goethe

More Swans and More Women

Such a Lovely Garden

Wallpaper Everywhere Even the Ceiling

ii

We Are Not Getting Anywhere

The Small Husband

Bash

Saturday

It Feels Like It Is on Purpose

Up Again with the Night

The Angry Faun

In Accordance

The Spider

Difficulties

I Am Coming Over

A Very Remarkable Story

And Then We Clap Ourselves Together

What Is Amazing

iii

What Will Grow Here

Happy and Glorious

Parking Lot

Go and Play Outside

Some Combinations

I Will Know You by Your Red Carnation

Ladies a Basket

Last Time I Wore This Sweater

For Henri

To Do

Infinitives

Route 109

Classic Hook Shape

Under the Moon the Knocking

Directly at the Sun

A Long Life