Heather Christle
Two new books--
IN THE RHODODENDRONS: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf
PAPER CROWN: Poems
both out now.
linktr.ee/heatherchristle
- Reposted by Heather ChristleWe didn't say body cams on ICE. Their murders are already on video. We said no more ICE.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleI get tired of saying it, but I’ll say it again: the nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people. But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.
- The word dismantle has been dogging me in various forms all morning. (Not kindly, not unkindly. Determined.) And the image of a sugar cube. And I do not have time to write a poem. And my notebook is out of reach. So.
- Also I cannot get over the perfection of "tongs." Just looking at the word makes it (them? tongs!) politely extract a sugar cube from my head.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleThis exactly why I tell people to fight misogyny and child abuse if they want to fight authoritarianism. Those are pillars of fascism that so many people think are “normal” parts of a “democratic” society. News flash: they have no place in a democratic society.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleThis from @andreapitzer.bsky.social is key. “nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.”
- Reposted by Heather ChristleIt’s a shame that Glasgow don’t have any artists.
- Reposted by Heather Christle[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Heather Christle“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...
- Reposted by Heather ChristleYesterday I taught a class about the historiography of Stonewall. I used the official defacing of the Stonewall National Monument - removing the TQ+ by the administration - to illustrate how public memory and debates about history, aka historiography, have relevance today. Next year I'll use this.
- Reposted by Heather Christlei once read "the rights you think criminals should have are the rights you think everyone should have because the state can criminalize anyone" and it changed how i think about everything
- Reposted by Heather ChristleIn a country with an actual free press, the photo of that poor old man would be the cover of every single paper with a headline that reads ENOUGH.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleHmong man detained by ICE today in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Photo via Reuters)
- Dislike the days where lines from "England in 1819" start running at random through my head.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleIn 2026, we're launching an ambitious effort to track legacy news media's coverage of the trans community, with a focus on the words news outlets choose and how those are changing as right wing pressure threatens the independence of our press. www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...
- Reposted by Heather ChristleNobody is “grooming” your kids to be gay or trans but people are grooming them to be Nazis.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleICE/CBP just shot two people in Portland.
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View full threadReposted by Heather ChristleConfirmation here. katu.com/news/local/i...
- Reposted by Heather ChristleMake it viral.
- They shoot people, then lie about it, almost as if that's their job.
- Reposted by Heather Christle“We are here to say no — no to the kidnapping of our neighbors, no to the normalization of fascist violence. We are here because our love and decency are stronger than our fears, and because we know we will find courage in each other.”
- Reposted by Heather ChristleMinneapolis.
- Reposted by Heather Christlethis was also consensus opinion for center-right types after george floyd’s murder five years ago. the state media apparatus will be working overtime the next few weeks to reprogram them
- Reposted by Heather Christlean eyewitness to the Minneapolis ICE shooting told me the victim appeared "obviously scared" and "was going to leave" before an ICE agent fired multiple shots "right into, it seemed like, her face" www.huffpost.com/entry/ice-sh...
- Reposted by Heather ChristleLike those before it, that insane, vile DHS statement about the Minneapolis shooting isn't about covering anything up. It's performative lying. They aren't trying to persuade anyone that their agents did nothing wrong. They're trying to project that their agents can get away with anything.
- Reposted by Heather Christlelosing my mind at the "she should have followed directions" people really? really? you're cool with "if you don't follow directions, they get to kill you"? that seems like a good state of affairs to you? that seems like how law enforcement ought to work: instant obeisance or death?
- Working on syllabi apparently sets off some Rube Goldberg machine in my mind that ends with a hammer smashing a toothpaste tube full of poems--two have already come out today.
- “I watched it literally like you are watching a television show" could be a sentence he uttered about any one of his cursed administration's actions.
- Reposted by Heather Christle"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!
- This made me happy.
- A generous and intelligent essay on Vanessa Bell by Heather Christle. I was especially struck by how the figure of the host reframes domestic modernism, and by the return to Mrs Dalloway as a point of pressure. #virginiawoolf #modernism #vanessabell #mrsdalloway www.thebeliever.net/vanessa-bell...
- When the president says "Thank you very much. It’s a very important thing to say. And we mean it" to families of the students who were killed at Brown, what exactly is he thanking them for?
- I know this isn't even the most deranged thing he's said over the past two days, but for whatever reason it's the one that makes me most acutely fear that basic language comprehension is daily increasing its resemblance to a starving polar bear on a melting ice floe.
- Sometimes you write lines in such a way that they will refuse to separate in future, like spaghetti you forgot to stir.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleI wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
- Reposted by Heather ChristleAgain, there is no plan for running our universities without federal funding, or foreign students, at scale. But the public has no idea about this because no. one. is. telling. them. this. They expect their kids are still going to be able to do all the things at college in the next 4 years, & well:
- Linguistics is so bananas: "[A]nother banana signals an additional banana in addition to some first banana."
- Reading the news right now is not great. One of the hardest things about writing IN THE RHODODENDRONS was hearing the reactions--of people I thought I knew--to the fact that a man in his twenties brought me into an alleyway to have sex with me while I was drunk and fourteen.
- There are people who think that if I didn't resist, then it was basically not a big deal. I wish I could un-know that about them sometimes.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleBREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org
- Whenever I see this kind of tech advertised, I can't stop thinking about all of the unruly, interior parts of a life, which affect how we behave but are distasteful to the sensibilities of profit-seeking owners (and imagined users) and therefore doomed to be deleted from posthumous avatars.
- To be clear, I want none of this, but if I were to suddenly feel the need for a posthumous avatar of my grandmother I would want one that included her particular shames & idiosyncratic pleasures. The fears she would not know how to name! Her boringness! The dreams she woke from and promptly forgot!
- I remember buying my first not-for-a-class book of contemporary poetry at the Grolier Book Shop when I was a baby poet and tonight I am almost completely grown up and reading there with fellow adult @rvtrousdale.bsky.social
- 7pm 6 Plympton St Cambridge, MA or on THE internet more info here www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org/upcoming-rea...
- Teaching Inger Christensen's Alphabet today and no matter what else happens that is an indisputable good.
- There's a lot of pressure on women to find innovative ways to ruin the workplace--let's team up and share some strategies that have worked?
- I really love Elliot's readings.
- Today’s poem: Heather Christle, “The Running of Several Simulations at Once May Lead to Murky Data” #lunchpoems
- Two more events this month and then I am done with book-travel until January. Next week Boston (see flier for details), then Madison on Nov 22. (Flier coming soon.) If you live in one of those places I would like to read poems to you with my actual mouth.
- You can RSVP here: lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/a7uq2...
- Or zoom is an option too: lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/7ttdx...
- Reposted by Heather ChristleThe “they’re rapists” line from racists is not about women’s autonomy or dignity; it’s not even about the wrongness of rape. It is about white men’s property interests over white women. It’s not “they’re doing something horrible”; it’s “they’re raping the ones only you have a right to rape.”
- "[T]he formulaic is recast as reflecting human nature...as opposed to a feature of algorithmically generated content that usefully serves to shrink audiences' horizons and harden their tastes, thereby making it easier to predict what they will or won't consume next."
- "This is not literature as 'entertainment,' no. It’s literature as propaganda." Rachele Dini discusses OpenAI’s “A Machine-Shaped Hand” and an academic sector in crisis. lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-…
- The word "boing" is one I find incredibly embarrassing to be associated with/be made to say aloud. So I put it in a poem. (This one.)
- i love the formal tensions in this one from the recent @heatherchristle.bsky.social collection - beautiful, sudden accumulation of body-having revelations vs tradpoem-about-language
- Reposted by Heather ChristleY’all here is a fun fact: Portland has a brand new volunteer organization called “operation inflation” that allows people to borrow inflatable costumes for protests. They just started a couple weeks ago and have like a 160 costume library (and counting because people keep donating).
- Reposted by Heather Christlethe owlishness of certain people Heather Christle, from PAPER CROWN
- Curious how other people might answer this question (borrowed from W. S. Graham)
- Reposted by Heather Christle"It’s a form of resistance that requires us to put aside ego, and the need for personal gratification, to become a node in a living network of care, support, and defense." More than anything else I hope the legacy of this moment will be organized care everywhere
- Going back and forth between listening to podcasts about the Spanish Civil War and holding a kitten and reading about large language models and holding a kitten and writing about universities' capitulation to the loyalty oath during the red scare and holding a kitten... thank you, kitten.
- Wrote about Vanessa Bell--Modernist artist (and Virginia Woolf's sister)--and the various kinds of host one can be, with a little light antifascism on the side.
- "Both Woolf and her older sister, Vanessa Bell, knew well the dangers of becoming stuck in that role, forever passing tea and buns about the room, never speaking beyond decorum’s limits." — @heatherchristle.bsky.social essay on Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell www.thebeliever.net/vanessa-bell...
- TIL that the CEO of Core Civic (the private detentions company who runs the only known ICE facility holding families...
- ...where "outside monitors have heard accounts of shortages of clean drinking water, chronic sleep deprivation and kids struggling for hygiene supplies and prompt medical attention) also teaches Sunday school.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleIt's here!
- Reposted by Heather ChristleBreaking news from Des Moines: ICE has detained Dr. Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Iowa's largest school district. The Des Moines Public Schools said "We have no confirmed information as to why Dr. Roberts is being detained or the next potential steps." www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/09/26/i...
- accidentally ordered a dinner that matches my book
- One tech company's slogan is NEVER WONDER and another is literally called PANOPTO and in conclusion I have no words or expect that to soon be the case.
- Reposted by Heather Christleseriously. The Big Dumb Algorithm can be bent as much by a twenty-second "loved it" as an eight-page screed.
- NYC TONIGHGHT
- Seeking a term akin to proprioception but for the sense of one's mortality; does such a thing exist? (I swear I am so fun to talk to.)
- Reposted by Heather ChristleLet me tell you, the number of times where having For Grace After a Party by Frank O'Hara memorized has come in handy is less than five but it sure is more than zero.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleSens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for answers after more than a dozen people died in immigration detention, as the department rushes to expand.
- It's feeling more and more important to be able to gather together in physical space, hope I get to see some of you! 9/26 NYC (McNally Jackson Seaport) 10/4 ATL (Decatur Book Festival) 10/16 Sarah Lawrence 10/30 Hollins University
- Sidenote: please don't be shy about saying hello! I love signing books and just talking with people, learning more of everyone's worlds and minds.
- Reposted by Heather Christlethey’re putting Kimmel back on the air. I would now like to see the same amount of outrage for the firing of professors for their statements
- Reposted by Heather ChristleToday’s poem is selected by Heather Christle (@heatherchristle.bsky.social) as part of the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleToday’s poem: Heather Christle, “I know what I’m talking about” #lunchpoems
- Researching and writing this was a joy. I began in an attitude of skepticism and ended elsewhere.
- @heatherchristle.bsky.social on a recent exhibition exploring the works of modernist painter and Bloomsbury Group member Vanessa Bell: www.thebeliever.net/vanessa-bell...
- If you memorize a poem you will have it with you in an emergency. You could add that to your list.
- Reposted by Heather ChristleWe have been shadowbanned on this event and yet we are nearly sold out…come help us sell out and show your love and support for Palestine and Gaza. www.ticketmaster.com/voices-for-g...
- I am going to be reading/talking in these places this month: 9/2 Memoiring Book Club (online) 9/4 The Writer's Center (online) 9/11 Amherst Books (Amherst, MA) 9/17 & 9/18 Emory University (Atlanta, GA) 9/26 McNally Jackson Books Seaport (NYC) More details below!
