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).
ISBN-13: 9781571315472
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: 03-15-2022
Pages: 96
Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)
Jos Charles is the author of a Year & 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 Universityof Arizona. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, California.
Read an Excerpt
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
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Table of Contents
CONTENTS
LIKE YOU
I CLIMBED TO SEE
WHERE
a Year
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
A NOTE on language
A NEW YORK POEM
A SONG
A FANTASY
A LYRIC
A NOTE on form
