If Charles’s previous book, the Pulitzer finalist feeld, employed Chaucerian language as a way of gaining lyrical access to time-traversing realms of consciousness, the poems seek to strip language to its borderlines-between self and other, past and present, private and public The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry that navigates the eponymous year, witnessing the travails of an afflicted, declining nation. Of landscape and precarity, of naming and process, this quietly powerful verse cuts “like a scabbard we shuffle through.”-Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!Ī Year & Other Poems contemplates form and the clock of calendar as they lyric and listen with thoughtful grief-rage. This was a Year that I did not want to end. What good luck to live in a time when such innermost music is made.-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicĪ layered work of fierce tenderness, a Year & other poems simultaneously holds, and is held in place by, an inner framework of language that astonishingly and brilliantly is further deployed in the service of the language of the poems. Here is a poet who is a cousin of Niedecker and Celan and Valentine, a maker of silences that speak, of grievances that lyric us. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.A Year & other poems, milkweed editions, 2022 'gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.' 'did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.' The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer-making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. A lot of praise and thought has already been given to Jos Charles’s new book of poetry, feeld, and for good reason.Written in a faux-Chaucerian version of English which slips between archaism and text-speak, Charles uses the history of the English language to bend it almost until the point that it breaks, and, through those twists and fissures, creates a space for her (trans, queer) voice to. In Charles's electrifying transliteration of English-Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect-what is old is made new again. 'i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.' In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Jos Charles's revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. Poetic exploration in Middle English about the body, physical space, ownership of space, gender, and transitioning. FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE Jos Charles’ new collection, feeld (Milkweed Editions), is not only a reexamination of language, but a reinvention words become unique, tricky, and wondrous, once again.

Feeld by jos charles