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 at http://heatherchristle.site.wesleyan.edu.

 

Heather Christle is also the author of What Is Amazing, The Difficult Farm, and The Trees The Trees, which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. She has taught poetry at Antioch College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Emory University. She currently lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and this is her fourth book of poetry.

Praise for Heliopause

“Proof that the world of poetry chugs along with quiet but spirited strength, Christle publishes her fourth collection, filled with imagination and sharp personal moments.
—Tiffany Gilbert, TimeOut New York, “The Most Anticipated Books of 2015”

“[R]ising star Heather Christle attempts to transcend our solar system with the aptly titled Heliopause. Her fourth book, and second from Wesleyan, probes the boundaries of the known and unknown like a poetic Voyager 1.
—Alex Crowley, Publisher’s Weekly, selected by PW as a “Top Ten Poetry Titles of Spring 2015”

“With her first book, Heather Christle established herself as one of our most exciting new poets. With Heliopause, her astonishing fourth collection, it’s clear she’s one of our most essential. Smart, grave, tender, and fiercely alive, these poems vibrate with the hushed power of just-before-the-storm: magnetic, charged, eerily clear.”
—Lisa Olstein, author of Little Stranger

“’On the sidewalk / I’m watching a full-length / animation the trees made / w/technical direction / from the sun,’ writes Heather Christle in her beautiful shadow-play of a book, Heliopause. These twenty-first-century allegories of the cave disclose ‘the dark uncovered places / of now becoming a then.’ Christle’s work makes that dark shine.”
—Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager

 

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

 

From the book:

AND THIS TOO COMES APART

 

People agree with sleep
They nod into it
but death they sometimes fight off
until they can’t
and then
from their graves
they stick out their tongues

Good for them
Good for the people

In the world I can see
there is one tree still raining
The sun blares around
lights it up
in lines alongside the spiders’

They have an arrangement
a private design

When I’m arranged
into a mother
I will name my child
Incredulity and like it so much
I’ll do it again
three or four
or eight times

Stand up!
Good and straight like a tree
good and stiff like
the rain darkened gravestone
perpendicular
to the quiet

Or sit down
and make a nice lap
nod Incredulity off into sleep

Enumerate to her the lines
of the song you haven’t meant yet