A Year & Other Poems

Jos Charles

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From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.

Jos Charles's poems communicate with one another as neurons do: sharp, charged, in language that predates language. "A scandal / three cartons red / in a hedge / in / each the thousand eye research of flies." With acute lyricism, she documents how a person endures seemingly relentless devastation--California wildfires, despotic legislation, housing insecurity--amid illusions of safety. "I wanted to believe," Charles declares, "a corner a print leaned to / a corner can save / a people." Still the house falls apart. Death visits and lingers. Belief proves, again and again, that belief alone is not enough.

Yet miraculously, one might still manage to seek--propelled by love, or hope, or sometimes only momentum--something better. There is a place where there are no futile longings, no persistent institutional threats to one's life. Poems might take us there; tenderness, too, as long as we can manage to keep moving. "A current / gives as much as it has," writes Charles--despite fire, despite loss.

Harrowing and gorgeous, a Year & other poems is an astonishing new collection from a poet of "unusual beauty and lyricism" (New Yorker).

Book Details

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publish Date: Mar 15th, 2022
Pages: 96
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.60in - 5.70in - 0.80in - 0.65lb
EAN: 9781571315472
Categories: • LGBTQ+• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss• Subjects & Themes - Places

About the Author

Charles, Jos: - Jos Charles is the author of a Year and other poems and feeld, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah. She is also the author of Safe Space, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In 2016, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. Jos Charles received an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, California.

Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book

Praise for a Year & other poems
"Spare and elegantly crafted, [Charles's] poems read like spotlights in the room of the page."--Shondaland
"[a Year & other poems is] astounding, the poems charged like the moment before a static shock, documenting losses, fears, and longings both personal and collective . . . I remain deeply moved by how carefully and intentionally Charles selects and places each syllable on the page, and by how that care extends to us as readers."--Timothy Otte, Literary Hub
"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 here seek to strip language to its borderlines--between self and other, past and present, private and public--not to evanesce in abstraction but to hold the mind within contrarious states of being . . . The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry."--David Woo, Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books blog
"The luminous latest from Charles unfolds in a series of short lyrics over the course of a year, holding time's progression in a delicate balance with a changing self . . . Readers are asked to wade into the idiosyncratic language of another's mind, and to be transformed by it . . . Charles's abstract and elegiac lyricism lends beauty to these intriguing pages."--Publishers Weekly
"[Charles's] spare lyrics emerge from the page in Sapphic fragments, striving to articulate not the physical presence of things, but the nearly invisible traces their absence leaves on our consciousness. The result is an inner life sculpted in language, one revised to weather a new, if diminished, future . . . Charles remains a serious experimental poet who has tasked herself with the challenge of creating 'a language capable of itself.'"--Library Journal
"Flashes of interiority, memory, and attention bring the space of this particular time in the speaker's life into relation with the living that goes on happening on either side of its arbitrary limits...a Year & other poems is so staggering precisely because of how relentless Charles is in her commitment to reaching despite and because of, in equal measure, loss."--Bradley Trumpheller, Cleveland Review of Books
"Jos Charles' latest collection did that thin, that astounding act of drilling a space in the world around me as I read, opening up a vigorous stillness. These poems core out evolving feelings over the course of a difficult year, in so intimate a way, it rocked me. In language that feels ancient, legacied, Charles allows--and trusts--her readers to witness what survives. I'm honored to be one of them, to read from this vantage point, beyond specific circumstances into the senses of them. A reading experience unlike any other." --Hannah Fenster, The Ivy Bookshop
"These are little snatches of smoke from a beautiful fire. Sophisticated and bare, [the poems] offer a meditation on love, longing, loss. They have their own unique architecture, a deliberate structure that leads the eye through a feeling, deliberate in its placement on the page." --Aimee Keeble, Main Street Books (NC)
"'The poem is perhaps, ' Jos Charles hypothesizes, 'a room.' And the rooms of a Year & other poems are quiet and sparse, made hollow by uncertainty, its attendant fear, and grief. But in other rooms, Charles makes a generous offering, where she places a beloved in a poem to climb a tree and devour grapefruit, and suddenly the poem becomes a space for not recounting what's gone, what's going, and what remains, but a site of play and possibility--a place where grief gets reversed." --Basia Wilson, Inwood Books North
"A consummate craftsperson, Jos Charles crafts lines brief as a single syllable with a universe of meaning, where sentences do not know their end or beginning. A 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. This was a Year that I did not want to end."--M. NourbeSe Philip
"'Months / I move in you' so begins this brilliant lyric cycle, a daybook, a hymnbook, a book of whispers to the dead and the living, a book of lullabies, of songs, of spells. I can tell you that Jos Charles is one of my most favorite living poets. But what does that mean?
It means that Charles can see how our 'world is / a lake the shape of / a lake' and set it to music. It means that she makes me believe in pure lyric again. It means that Charles knows how silence speaks between the lines, between syllables, and shows it to us as the pages (and days of the year) turn. 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. It means Jos Charles is a kind of poet whose writing teaches us to pay attention to our language again, because attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Because a true understanding is always silence. 'I go / to put holly to the lip' she says, and she takes us readers along for the ride. What a gift. Listen carefully to these pages, and you will find a 'wind / on a microphone, ' and you will hear how 'we wept / a quiet English / the day contained.' What good luck to live in a time when such innermost music is made."--Ilya Kaminsky
"Measured in event and situated in survival, the poems of a Year & other poems contemplate form and the clock of calendar as they lyric and listen with thoughtful grief-rage. Of landscape and precarity, of naming and process, this quietly powerful verse cuts "like a scabbard we shuffle through."--Hoa Nguyen
"In a Year, Jos Charles writes of gratitude made wise by grief, grief made whole by joy. 'Months / I move in you, ' she says--time is the subject, time is the beloved, time wraps its arms around us to soften our pain, diffuse our suffering. 'When was it ever September, tides pouring over / When whales like men moved about the earth.' There's not another poet alive who could have written that, who could have built this astonishing monument to enduring, one moment at a time, despite. 'In the street / they are starting fires It warms even us.' Charles has given us another masterpiece. I sit, gratefully, at her feet."--Kaveh Akbar
Praise for feeld
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
"A book like none other: in a personalized version of Chaucer's fourteenth-century English, Charles, a transgender woman, renders poems of unusual beauty and lyricism. . . . This is my current favorite book of 2018."―Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

"Charles, a trans woman, turns to a sort of Chaucerian-texting hybrid in an inspired effort to find language as unstable as her experience."―New York Times

"Dazzling . . . In Charles's hands, the language itself transitions, defamiliarized, and in its new spellings it opens to a poly-vocality where words contain hidden meanings."―Paris Review

"In feeld, the trans poet Jos Charles bends language, via willful spelling, to a place where it must be parsed slowly, struggled through, read not so much with the brain as the mouth. Language becomes a felt thing, a terrain to be crossed. . . . Through the strange labor of deciphering the text of feeld, I come to understand that Charles is transmitting an experience that I must allow to travel from her body into mine."―Tracy K. Smith, New York Times

"feeld is beguiling work, reimagining a new language somewhere between Middle English and the digital world of the 21st century. With that, Charles manages an excavation of language and trans identity."―Irish Times ("Best Books By Women of the 21st Century")

"Like the title of the collection, Charles treats language like an open field, a clearing in which something new can be built. Her re-spellings embody this philosophy, challenging readers to explore the open spaces, new meanings and, perhaps, find their place in them."―PBS NewsHour

"Completely stunning in its lyrical leaps . . . The joy in reading this out loud, in the unraveling textures of each word . . . Vital, tender work."― Poetry

"Could we say Charles's glorious feeld inextricates the battles for the past and for the future? feeld dives back into the wreckage, spins heart-stopping poems of trans life and struggle from the addictive, mouth-twisting lexica of Middle English."―Jordy Rosenberg, Nylon

"With language that knocks its reader off-balance, Jos Charles's feeld makes space, builds a stage, stretches out a hand, for the trans and queer bodies so often shunted to the side."―Bustle

"[feeld is] a totally new sound . . . an unprecedented syntax to accommodate an unprecedented experience. Every poet gropes their way towards this kind of sui generis utterance, but so few of us achieve it so absolutely."―Kaveh Akbar, American Poetry Review

"A reinvention―words become unique, tricky, and wondrous. . . . Against a neopastoral landscape overgrown with 'swolen leef' and 'boyish nectre, ' Charles explores the permutations and perforations of identity."―BOMB

"[feeld] is a profound body of work that's thought-provoking and wholly visceral. Ripe with natural imagery, surprising puns, and political statements that are jarring both in their truth and placement, feeld challenges the idea that writing about nature is only for straight, white, cis men."―Shondaland

"Disarming and engrossing . . . The collection undoes easy divisions between interior and exterior or science and nature. . . . Throughout, readers are subject to a careful recalibration of values, as Charles shows that a form is not important because it is static but rather because of the ways it changes, moves, and is perceived."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)