'A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book' Esme Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
'Spellbinding and propulsive' Leni Zeumas, author of Red Clocks
'The Crying Book is a rigorous and urgent work but it reads like an intimate gift' Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
'This book began five years ago with an idle idea about what it might look like to make a map of every place I'd ever cried, an idea I carried into conversation with friends, not knowing, how many years and pages would grow around it, not knowing how that growth would change the way I viewtears'
During a period of intense grief that coincides with the birth of her first child, acclaimed poet Heather Christle starts to research the deeply human impulse to shed tears. As Christle looks to art, nature, science, history and her own experience to understand crying in all its colours and textures - so she slowly begins to find new ways of understanding life.
Honest, intelligent, rapturous and surprising, THE CRYING BOOK is a poignant, personal tribute to the astonishing strangeness of tears and the startling resilience of joy.
