What is Amazing (Hardcover)

Author: Heather Christle

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press (2013)

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.

"...look out for Heather Christle's What is Amazing; Christle has been generating lots of buzz in poetry circles for her jumpy poems about, among other things, love."

–Craig Morgan Teicher

"If one aspect of poetry's work is to capture the texture of subjectivity in any given moment, then Heather Christle's poems may well be one of the places readers turn when they want to know what it was like to be young and paying attention in the early 21st century. These sly, nimble notations of consciousness feel like pages from a secret notebook, but they're oddly bold and forthright, too. Christle is a kind of psychic seismograph, recording the major and minor tremors that ripple through her awareness, and her poems are wide awake."

–Mark Doty