Book details

Book description

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. "(T)he poems in What is Amazing radiate with boundless joy and celebration, rich in an enthusiasm that so much other poetry lacks. ...These poems are wonderfully fresh, and the sytax startles in such strange ways, electrifying subtle musing against the absolutely fantastic and banal. Her poems know full well how to live in the moment, and capture the same." --Rob McLennan HEATHER CHRISTLE has taught at Emory University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is the author of The Difficult Farm and The Trees The Trees.