Heliopause

By Heather Christle

Heather Christle's stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun's sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle's work. An online reader's companion will be available.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780819575302

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

A Perfect Catastrophe

To have stood midfield among the vast and livid green

and never heard the grasses take their vow of silence

is experience, not evidence, and meanwhile clouds descend

and buffer light. When did I arrive? I recall it came on

slowly as a fever as a poem is a communicable please.

What’s in charge here is the scattered light all over

and how it pulls my very blood into my hands

until they graph a fat what the sun likes holding

and some dumb mutter good and nails me to the bone.

Disintegration Loop 1.1

▪ for William Basinski

In seeking to resolve a conflict

between two parties

            one can assume

each believes it is acting

in good faith

  just as the hopeful

gravel waits for your rough step

▴

The only way to be truly alone

is for there to be nothing

not even myself

▴

In looping you rephrase after listening

to what the person has to say

what the person had to say

and having the new words affirmed

you wait and listen again

▴

Myself the eager magnet

for another to address

▴

Maybe I should think this a spiral

a loop that gets closer

a loop that will not close

▴

To make nothing

draw a circle

around what isn’t there

▴

I found a note I left in the corner

of a part of the poem we rarely used

If you ever feel trapped

                it said

this is where to escape

▴

But legally I owe you nothing

I owe you at least that much

▴

Like being haunted by the spirit of the letter

▴

I remember my teacher’s story

of two teenagers who died in a blizzard

trying to stay warm

           and the tailpipe

blocked with snow

so I always check

but it still happens

          just yesterday

a man’s young son in what the