Jennifer Szalai Reviews The Crying Book

Heather Christle's newest collection, The Crying Book, is the subject of a review in the New York Times. In it, Jennifer Szalai notes "the poet Heather Christle writes in 'The Crying Book,' humans are continuously producing 'basal' tears, to lubricate our eyes, while 'irritant' tears flush out foreign objects." From there: 

Tears for drinking should be “psychogenic,” or emotionally produced; they’re richer in proteins and more viscous. Presumably this makes them more delicious. It also makes them fall more slowly, so that they’re easier for others to see.

This communicative aspect of crying is one of the trickier notions that Christle wrestles with in her peculiar and indelible book. She’s fully aware that tears aren’t always to be trusted, even though they can come unbidden and unwanted — the reflexive byproduct of overwhelming emotion. She conveys her beliefs and suspicions in discrete paragraphs of text, quoting lines of poetry, personal correspondence, psychological studies. (Writers like Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso are distinguished practitioners of the form.) Some sections are as short as a sentence; almost all open up new possibilities for inquiry: “I believe in ending sentences with a preposition in order to give the ideas a way out.”

Christle weaves in her own experiences — she has a child; a friend commits suicide; she gets so suffused with despair that it feels like “a kind of decomposition” — but she knows better than to venerate the image of the sad, suffering woman ennobled by her distress. She opens her book by disabusing anyone who ascribes to that fantasy, while earning the trust of those who don’t. “After a real cry,” she writes in the first sentence, “most people are hideous.”

Read more at the New York Times.