Paper Crown

'In the morning I drink / coffee until I can see / a way to love life / again. It's okay, there's / no difference between flying and thinking / you're flying until / you land. Somehow / I own like six nail clippers / and I honestly can't / remember ever buying / even one.' Since Heather Christle published her last poetry collection a decade ago, her nonfiction works The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons have found her readers around the world. Paper Crown marks Christle's exuberant return to her home genre, in which she combines the imagination of her earliest poetry with the personal elements of her more recent prose. These poems conjure moments when the world's events (a child's words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinner with friends) align themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity. With tenderness and verve, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognize that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem.