The Crying Book

Chepstow Books & Gifts Verified independent store

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Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces he r joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture and perils of crying - from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence. Told in short, poetic snippets, 'The Crying Book' delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women's agency - or lack of agency - in everyday life. Show more