... my expectations were properly shattered ... Christle’s piece is a gorgeous, meditative account of crying in all its forms, both individual and collective ... Christle probes at the edges of what is acceptable in our world ... Formally, the book is simple, quiet, but complex. The work progresses in a series of short vignettes—singular stories, but also forming a whole. Often Christle will shift from the individual to the collective from one paragraph to the next, widening or narrowing the aperture of her focus to encapsulate the entire cosmos, or hone in on a personal memory ... The most profound are the moments she speaks directly about herself ... But perhaps it’s her formal structure that is the most compelling. Strung together like a little strand of pearls, each piece functions as its own little emotional event, but as a whole they’re all the same. Much like how every time you cry it’s for a different reason, but the feeling of being on the precipice of tears never changes. Formally, Christle has achieved just that: an intense and moving catalog of tears, of stanzas ... [Christle] has made the amorphous take shape, woven the personal into the analytical, borne witness to something we choose to shrug off ... Bearing witness to both the physicality and emotionality of crying, Christle’s sermon is analytical, elegiac. A watercolor painting. I’m reminded of Mary Poppins’ chalk illustrations, washed away by rain. The colors cohering into something altogether new, sadder, full of sorrow.
The Crying Book is a stunning work, a constellation of prose poems that plumb the depths of crying: how it feels, why it matters, and, perhaps most importantly, what it means ... Christle sets out to understand the significance of crying in every possible human context, adopting social, historical, and biological lenses to conduct her inquiry. Christle deftly balances her roles as researcher and research subject ... It is Christle, our own weeping subject, that makes The Crying Book so affecting. She studies tears tenderly, even intimately, motivated by a heartfelt desire to understand. What could have easily been a dry but informative volume on crying and its many meanings becomes a more holistic portrait of crying ... she proves to be a graceful navigator across that sea of tears, charting a path full of discoveries and arresting observations.
... peculiar and indelible ... [Christle] conveys her beliefs and suspicions in discrete paragraphs of text, quoting lines of poetry, personal correspondence, psychological studies. (Writers like Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso are distinguished practitioners of the form.) Some sections are as short as a sentence; almost all open up new possibilities for inquiry ... 'Tears are a sign of powerlessness,' Christle writes, 'a ‘woman’s weapon.’' Another writer might have left it at that, but Christle keeps the sentence wriggling without letting it off the hook.
... lends itself to a particular kind of reader. Christle is known as a poet, and this is her first work of prose, but while the book is similar to other creative-nonfiction prose books by poets—like Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies—The Crying Book feels looser and less concerned with narrative ... Outside of the research, the book’s most striking moments are when Christle sounds like a poet—where she mixes the sadness of her subject matter with a playful and surprising freedom on the page.
What emerged in me, at first, was wariness. There can be something suspect about dolor, with its seam of gratification, and Christle’s self-awareness occasionally falters, so that her objective can feel less like catharsis than like a literary ode to wallowing ... But Christle anticipates this skepticism, the way grief can feel secretly thrilled at itself, and addresses it in several ways ... a sincerity that makes room for the reader’s embarrassment, thereby neutralizing it ... her unguarded tone shifts the burden of that shame onto us, forcing a consideration of our own sympathy and distaste ... evocative factoids ... There is power in holding grief at a remove, [Christle] knows, but The Crying Book seems determined to dissolve that remove: to press up against the edge of language, to push beyond representation into the real ... less a journey than a set of paratactic ideas. The reader surfaces, as if from a crying session, sensing that something has been gained, but unsure what.
The short book feels strangely capacious ... Not every entry earns its keep. Christle’s view of motherhood can seem cloying ... Yet the book’s effects are sly and cumulative, relying not so much on any one observation as on associations, echoes, contrasts—a method that reflects Christle’s view of art and life, the interdependence, the complex contagion and repetition of feeling and action and reaction that marks them. The Crying Book doesn’t command or seduce its readers, instead offering a developing sense of comradeship—if you choose to stay, you’re rewarded. It’s about grief and friendship, but only delicately so. Christle wants to preserve the particularity of experiences while illuminating what they have in common.
... reads like poetry and is reminiscent in style of Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2005). The cumulative effect hits the mark, and readers are sure to be moved to tears themselves. This is a lovely meditation on life and death through the lens of tears, both those spurred by grief and those by joy.
... not billed as poetry, but it’s not prose—it’s something very deeply embedded between genres. There are no line breaks, but there is lyricism and a poetic philosophy of the intimate relationship between things: tears, grief, war, motherhood, friendship, partnership, science, history. The literary world has already likened it to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, but Christle’s work seems to me more delicate, as though each turn of a tear-soaked page allows readers the permission, as Christle puts it, to be held. And to be held by a book is, I think, exactly what a reader craves.
She is good on the ugliness of crying ... a mysterious search and a journey that doesn’t reach its destination ... The broad range of her inquiry, which can move from Donald Trump to Byzantine lycanthropy in the space of a sentence, is one of the book’s primary pleasures. But its scattershot nature disrupts the through-line it also wants to develop ... Accompanying her throughout all this is the waxing and waning moon that Christle calls her 'despair'. She favours that word, she explains, because 'depression and suicidal ideation and anxiety all cast a staged or laboratory light', which seems to be both a confession and a withholding. This doubleness is problematic; a fault line at the heart of her book ... the fragments mostly stay scattered ... is interesting enough that Christle needn’t feel anxious about its fragmentation. But the one serious cost of its diffuseness is that its autobiographical elements – particularly those concerning Christle’s 'despair' – occupy an emotional no man’s land ... Christie offers no such 'proper perspective', but as a selector of unusual, arresting details, she is exceptional. Everyone who reads her book will find something that stays with them.
...a text constructed alongside crying rather than precisely from it, a work of free association across themes and ideas that mimics the writer’s conclusions regarding our tears ... Christle, who has published several poetry collections...is poised and precise with her sentences, and even though the book is the result of copious research (there are 198 endnotes), that heavy lifting is integrated lightly into the text ... As with other books of this ilk – Maggie Nelson’s Bluets comes to mind – Christle’s work is both rangy and focused ... There is a danger, of course, that Christle’s text pays too much homage to the work of Nelson or Offill; that it fails to mark out its own ground. On the other hand, if, as some have suggested, little books made up of interconnected fragments – often those that foreground the experience of contemporary motherhood in a disjointed world – present as the radical form for our era, then there is surely room for many such works ... These are books that remind us – when we need it most – that we move in relationship rather than individual adventure, that the tender connections between our tears are all we really have to hold.
Fusing poetry with lyric essay and a significant amount of research, the author sheds new light on the basic, universal phenomenon of crying ... Though this structure could make for a choppy text, the transitions between her various sources and streams of thought are mostly seamless, providing a pleasurable, even restful reading experience. The narrative is saturated with significant threads of sadness, but they don’t overwhelm. Rather, the unconventional format, combined with the author’s vast survey of the topic, provides fascinating food for thought ... A surprisingly hopeful meditation on why we shed tears.
