25th
The Seaside!
I just finished reading Heather Christle’s new chapbook from minutes BOOKS It’s called The Seaside!
And friends it was filled with so much goodness I had to read the poems out loud I wished I had an audience! I emailed some to friends right away like I was crazy
The poems are punctuated like this blog post There are no periods but sometimes there are exclamation points Capital letters are used to mark new sentences I read faster and faster until I crashed into exclamation points It was intense! I had to go back and read the poems out loud to slow down Sometimes I couldn’t be sure which sentence a particular clause was part of at least for the first couple reads and that gave things a lovely double-exposure kind of feeling
Heather Christle’s poems have a tone or a perspective or a way of orienting themselves to the world that is so open They refresh my real-world perspective and mental pathways
I’m not sure how the poems manage to be as open as they are and not sound naive or innocent It’s an impressive tight-rope act
I think someone else described Christle’s poems’ orientation as “post-fear” but I can’t seem to find where they wrote that And if they didn’t I just did because I think that’s a good way to talk about it The poems aren’t unafraid fear has nothing to do with it They are beyond everything as the Mooninites would say
So anyway you should maybe read The Seaside! and also read The Difficult Farm
Read a poem from The Seaside! here
