Heliopause
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Christle (What Is Amazing) reveals further maturation in this, her fourth collection, as she breaks down the belief that to separate oneself from the world is to be safe from it. The book is named for the theoretical boundary between our solar system and the interstellar medium, and Christle transports readers as if they were human Voyager spacecraft into just such a liminal zone. Overwhelmed by stimuli yet present in a flux of knowing/not knowing, the poet pushes to the point where language fails, recognizing "the general uselessness/ of looking to words for answers." Christle relates how "For a long time they did not know/ if Voyager had crossed the heliopause/ and we lived/ in the strange interim/ of an event perhaps having occurred/ ... without knowing what." A long poem inspired by composer William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops incorporates lines from friends and artists, in a form that takes cues from the musical composition. The presence of others, even in text, provides solace: "You will forgive me won't you/ for the lines/ I'm copying in/ I do not want to be alone here." It's a generous and warm collection, and Christle reminds us that to be alive is not to be safe from trauma, but to be aware of how intact one can remain in spite of pain and furious joy.
