A year & other poems

The luminous latest from Charles (feeld) 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. These carefully constructed poems are organized by their forms, with titles like "A Note," "A New York Poem," "A Song," "A Fantasy," and of course "A Year." While Charles's previous books were informed by the diction of social media (Safe Space) and of old English (feeld), this latest casts more widely, and privately, for its idiom, finding it in the poem itself: "I put you into a poem/ You climbed the giantest tree" and "We speak/ a language capable of itself." Like Paul Celan, whom the collection notes as a touchstone, readers are asked to wade into the idiosyncratic language of another's mind, and to be transformed by it, "Awaiting/ not clarity," Charles writes, "but mineral a membrane/ between us." "Awaiting not clarity" they repeat afterward, "but the shadow of something clear." Charles's abstract and elegiac lyricism lends beauty to these intriguing pages. (Mar.)

This third collection by trans poet Charles (after feeld, the 2019 Pulitzer poetry finalist) registers a year characterized by loss, separation and despair for a planet in the process of environmental annihilation ("Desert hills all / aflame"). Like the ghostly, ashen shadows of Hiroshima, the poet'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 ("In the aenigma/ of a shadow/ of a window left open/ for wind/ to leave"). The result is an inner life sculpted in language ("What was crossed out is not the same/ as what was never written down"), one revised to weather a new, if diminished, future ("Awaiting not clarity but the shadow of something clear"). VERDICT Not as strikingly original in concept and language as feeld, this new collection adheres to a more personal, intimate aesthetic ("Our separate smoke/ caught/ in the same ascent") that may or may not connect with any given reader. Still, Charles remains a serious experimental poet who has tasked herself with the challenge of creating "a language capable of itself."--Fred Muratori

A NOTE on language Never having lived among but beside form I no longer look where the city lifts a little further past houses, ocean, light from a crane no longer looking the child hurried beside a mother moving too too fast at what escapes the grasp of leaves & awnings of leaves, past what is lifted whatever word from whatever throat it's lodged there being only one throat between us, past perception & nevertheless perceiving as we must what moves between us, no longer roof but atmosphere precursor & remnant of speech remaining as it must perhaps the least effective of our music The river is cold The poem is perhaps a room a charwoman at its feet Under the blue blue sky It is Wednesday Dead things sink in the sky alive With grace I am with you in your labor until the last & I am joyful today for its structure Machinery clips the makers hand Impossible the leaves have changed Busied my self with days leaflets breathless days of belief or wanting belief Inscriptions of the coming heart when boys would hold your comprehensible neck & place boy you were so much to be free Excerpted from A Year and Other Poems by Jos Charles All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.