Heather Christle's "Advent"

Thoughts on this holy tumult.

Advent

It's hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can't help themselves
and how could you not love them for it
here in the new week with animals
burying food and everything outlined
in cold and even friends, it's hopeless,
this mess, this season, all that
is lost and tickets and strangers,
what can I say, only sitting here
on this dark bench waiting for what
I don't know, I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,
which does not know it loves me
and you, friends, spectacular driveways,
an orange, the vanishing year.



from Paper Crown (Wesleyan University Press, 2025)

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I love Heather Christle’s poetry very much, and when I heard that Paper Crown was coming out this year, I was ecstatic. It is Christle’s first book of poems in something like a decade, and it is full of poems and moments within poems that are jarring and delightful and absurd and beautiful.

Like this one, from “On a Walk”:

My child is upset that they cannot jump over their shadow.
They want me to help them. They want me to teach them
how it’s done. The best I can do is an invitation

to jump over each other’s shadows instead. 

Or this opening, from “All the Time in the World”:

If a person were to drag
their finger through the air 
and leave in the air a streak
of yellowing glowing light
I hope they would keep it
a secret unto themselves

(First of all, don’t you find this true? The joy, especially now, of having a little secret delight that feels yours and yours alone?)

And second of all, there’s something about Christle’s poetry that I really cherish, and in writing about her work before, I said something about how reading Christle’s work is “like meeting someone you’ve never met who is able to articulate a feeling you both share, with language you don’t have until you’ve listened.” That holds true. Really, one of the great delights of reading Christle’s poetry is the realization I come to, perhaps a few words into a poem, that I couldn’t possibly write a poem like this.

Now, when I encounter a realization like this while reading a poem, I hold onto it like a child holds onto a finger that isn’t theirs. But when I first started writing poems, I treated such a realization in a way that was almost possessive. I wanted to write like other poets — mostly, I think, out of a well-intentioned respect, a kind of reverence that made me want to be someone else instead of being myself. And so, my reaction to this feeling caused the following: I wrote poems that borrowed and poems that riffed, poems that tried to fit my feelings about the world into someone else’s language about the world. My strangeness, fitting into the strangeness of someone else. Impossible task; impossibly frustrating.

Looking back now, I realize that this kind of borrowing and fitting-in was a generative act, yes, but also one that repressed my ability to recognize the difference between someone else’s voice and my own. When I finally recognized that difference, I realized the way that reading poems that could not possibly be my own offered me the invaluable chance to figure out the tenor and pitch and timbre of my own voice. And, once this happened, I also — and perhaps just as importantly — found reading to feel far more delightful than it ever had. Instead of thinking why don’t I sound like that, I thought what! I didn’t know someone could sound like that. It made reading feel like encountering some new quartz on this here planet earth, like discovering a new rock while standing in a field full of rocks, holding some river-chiseled shining thing, serrated against your palms.

That’s what it feels like to read Heather Christle. I shake my head in disbelief; I shake my head in delight. I hold the rock of each poem in my hands, and it glitters and shimmers in the light, and I think I have held rocks and I have walked upon rocks and right now I am standing in a field full of rocks, and yet, and yet, and yet, I have never held a rock like this one.

Consider this poem today as an example. Consider so much about it! Consider how it is a single sentence. Have you considered that? Wonderful. Now that that’s done, consider how it makes a kind of fun out of grammar even in the first few words:

It's hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can't help themselves

Consider how the pronoun-antecedent agreement is already skewed from the jump. You say it’s out loud and look for a singular noun, but you are only given stars and books, which don’t agree at all! And yet! The poem goes on.

Like, consider these lines:

here in the new week with animals
burying food and everything outlined
in cold and even friends, it's hopeless

Consider that phrase even friends and the work it does here, in this off-kilter, slanted way. Are the friends outlined in cold? Or are they now, in the middle of this poem, being addressed? Could it be both? But how! And yet, and yet, and yet, consider how she does it again with the word strangers that comes in these lines that follow:

this mess, this season, all that
is lost and tickets and strangers,
what can I say

Consider the slanted-ness of all of this, the askance-ness of it all, the way the poem moves even as it doesn’t completely agree, and the way the poem agrees in different ways. Consider the accumulation of it all, the way it builds and builds and builds in a way that more closely resembles a life than anything I could write in a poem, these details stumbling and moving and bumping into one another, one after the other, the mind moving at a speed interrupted by the world even as it tries to make sense of the world. Consider the way the poem quite literally enacts the hyper speed of anxiety and the brain-bumping-madness of trying to live in a world that feels at once hopeless and full of love.

And then, consider how it resolves:¹

I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,
which does not know it loves me
and you, friends, spectacular driveways,
an orange, the vanishing year.

Ah! Beautiful, right? And even here, in those final lines, Christle performs that delightful oddity of language, with the friends who are addressed again, right in the midst of a list of things: spectacular driveways, an orange, the vanishing year. So the friends, then, are both people the speaker wants to remain with them and also people about whom the world does not know it loves.

If I could draw this poem on a page, I would have arrows pointing everywhere to indicate all the possibilities that it contains. It is a poem, as so much of Christle’s work is, that I cannot wrap my head around, and yet it is also a poem that holds me rapt in attention. I love this feeling. I love this feeling so much.

And, if I could impart any tiny bit of small and perhaps unasked-for wisdom, it might be to cultivate that feeling as often as you can in your reading life and in your life that exists outside of reading, which is also your reading life. What I mean is to approach a poem fully disarmed, to put down, for just a little bit, the tools of meaning-making, tools that I’ve found are kind of pointy and good for chiseling, which can be a noble task but can also be painful for the thing being chiseled. It’s a joy, is what I am trying to say, to let the poem arrive to you before you arrive to it. The poem doesn’t poke itself to say do I make sense; no, that’s you poking it. To refrain from poking for just a little longer than you usually might can be one of the more profound experiences of your life.

After that, sure. Poke all you want. Chisel the thing already made out of marble into a thing that you made out of marble.

Anyways, I am thinking of this poem today because I am thinking of this season of hope and hopelessness, this season of high contrasts, the harsh bite of the cold with the softness of the snow, the warmth of family with the loneliness, I imagine, of not having one. And I am thinking, especially, of these lines:

what can I say, only sitting here
on this dark bench waiting for what
I don't know, I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,

That I don’t know does so much work here, sitting as it does at the start of the line, beginning its own idea but also continuing the idea of what comes before, this idea about waiting for what I don’t know.

And I’m thinking of that phrase holy tumult as a particularly apt way to describe this world, holy as it is and tumultuous as it is, particularly in this season of high contrasts, where such holiness contrasts, quite starkly, with all that feels antithetical to holiness, the hyper consumption existing at the same time as mass deprivation, the language of comfort turned up to the millionth degree at the same time as a lesser language still continues — one of discomfort and marginalization, one where shelter is preferential rather than guaranteed, and then the the darkness, yes, quick as it comes, and how it comes right after an orange that, just before it vanishes, sets the world ablaze.

A holy tumult is what this world is, mostly because it is all we have. The holiness comes, I think, with that feeling of thinking you know it all, only to be surprised, as I was this morning, that the snow between the birch trees was the same color as the birch trees themselves, making it seem as if the trees grew from the snow itself, a kind of seasonal soil, scattered as it was beneath the branches. And the tumult comes, I think, with everything else. Coming home to a family you’re trying to understand or a family you’re trying to be understood by. The feeling of wanting more and less at the same time. The pain of navigating the bureaucracies of work and the awful oddity of having to pay for the care that comes as a result of sickness. The loneliness, my god, the loneliness, in a crowd of people. And the crowd of people themselves. Four wide on a sidewalk in New York City, and you’re navigating the difficult pain of trying to live inside your brain and you’re bumping arms with people you wish weren’t there and you hate yourself for wishing they weren’t there because you don’t actually wish they weren’t there, and you know it’s just a day that feels like too much for being a day, even as you wish you were a person who savored every second, and you feel broken for all this mess inside your head, because you want to love it all, you want to love it deeply and dearly, and that’s the tumult of it — not the fact that you can’t, but the fact that it’s hard.

When today’s poem talks about the hopelessness of it all, I think of that. Not that this world is hopeless always, but that it feels hopeless sometimes, even and especially now, when the sheer magnitude of what we sift through on a daily basis is a kind of language of loss, this stuff that would move us to our knees every waking second.

But I think, too, of a different kind of hopelessness. I think of the hopelessness of trying to make sense of it all. An impossible task, isn’t it? I think of the hopelessness of trying to pin it down, the hopelessness of trying to come to one, distinct, clear way of making any kind of clear and distinct sense of the world. Because I can’t, you know? Can you? We are made of stars and yet the stars are dying. We are steeped in loss and yet, just this evening, the sun set a kind of softened purple upon the water and made it seem as if the ocean had become, for a single minute, a resting place for every lilac in the world. I don’t know, is what I am trying to say, anything about it, only that it is. And that it is awful and beautiful and strange and magical and that sometimes, when the tip of my nose is frozen in the cold on a long run by the water, I can still feel the blood in my body reaching my big toe. And I can feel my big toe saying to me don’t fucking stop running, you madman, because you are keeping me warm. And it is warm and for a second I think I can go on forever, that I won’t have to stop. My god, I know I will, but it is enough to feel for a time that I won’t.

In this season, when the world tells us exactly how we should feel, whether grateful, or joyful, or festive, or together, I want to remember only to feel at all. The blood in my body and the salt spray against my face and your hand in mine, hopelessly waiting, hopelessly feeling, and yet hopeful all the same for something we do not know and could never possibly name.

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1. An announcement: I am teaching two virtual classes in early 2026 with the Adirondack Center for Writers. I had an absolute gem of a time teaching with them earlier this year, and I’m excited to offer two different classes. The first is called “Rewriting Your Life,” and will be a 5 week multi-genre workshop, for anyone writing poems, fiction, or essays. I’m really excited to try to offer a space that allows everyone, regardless of genre, to engage and grow and learn from one another. Here’s a bit from the class blurb:

   “In this 5-week online workshop led by Devin Kelly, we will use both poems and prose as models of how to write and read across genres. Works by Ross Gay, Heather Christle, Eula Biss, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and many others will ground us in a more permissive and generous approach to reading and writing, pushing us to refuse pure definitions and allowing us to explore what it means to write into our lives, in whatever form that may take.”

   The second, which I’m wildly excited about, is called “A Line As Long As the Heart Is Wide." It will be a deep dive into Larry Levis’s poetry in celebration of the release of his Collected Poems early next year. There’s no poet, I think, who has moved me more. Reading his poetry sets your bones on fire; it’s a tightrope walk that makes you believe in the soul. Absolutely beautiful and crushing. It’s work that dwells deeply in the heart of things. We’ll read a bunch of his poems, talk about them, let ourselves be moved by them, and then write with such feelings as inspiration.

2. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

3. The word ceasefire seems to be just a word. As news outlets report, Israel has violated the terms constantly, and, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted awhile ago, the language of ceasefire does not mean a language of peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it certainly does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.

1. A quick little footnote here to say something, for the second week in a row, about the great poet Steve Scafidi, and how the line of Scafidi’s that I have tattooed on my back comes from the end of this poem, which reads:

and when you see it
again say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do and
then offer it some sweet-grass and tell it stories
you remember from the star-chamber of the womb
or at least the latest joke, something good to keep it
company as otherwise it doesn’t know you are here
for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really
care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why.

Do you see the little echo between this poem and Christle’s? That bit that reads otherwise it doesn’t know you are here for love and how it sings ahead (or back) (or together) with the line from Christle’s poem about a world that does not know it loves me? Isn’t that something? These two poems talking across the years? The more I read, the more I think that’s what we’re doing. Talking to each other. Like, really. Talking to each other. That’s what we do when we write. We talk, because it matters. A book is a kind of magic trick in this regard. It brings all of us into the same room, even when we aren’t in the same room.