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feeld - Paperback | Diverse Reads

feeld

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FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A NEW YORKER BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A VULTURE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018

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.

“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. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “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.

Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

ISBN-13: 9781571315052

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Publication Date: 08-14-2018

Pages: 80

Product Dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.10(d)

Jos Charles is a trans poet, editor, and author of the collection Safe Space. She is the recipient of the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation and the 2015 Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She received an MFA from the Universityof Arizona and currently resides in Long Beach, California.

Read an Excerpt

I.

thees wite skirtes / & orang sweters / i wont / inn the feedynge marte /
wile mye vegetable partes bloome /
inn the commen waye / a grackel inn the guarden rooste / the tall wymon wasching handes /
or eyeing turnups
/ the sadened powres wee rub / so economicalie /
inn 1 virsion off thynges /
alarum is mye nayme
/ unkempt & handeld i am hors /
i am sadeld / i am a brokn hors

***

II.

next inn line at the feemale depositrie room / mye jossled eggs inn a witen sack /
were that i were goldenne mye rayte / the tayste off gold inn eggs / cravyng a room just emtied enuff
2 curl myeself inn / thees the dreggs / the grl beguines

***

XVI.

gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage / the nayme scrypt & the stayte scrypt preseed laping the milke in mye sacks / gendre lik all sirfase is a feemale depositrie room / in that clowde moses wept & wee exspeckte a lawe /
his fase lik lite &
r bodies goldenne in vagynoplastycitie / if u evre get downe mye mountain / he sade pirge me with hysop /
offer mye bulock on the alter / a tran is noting but the scens off sum burning / i a lone hav scaped 2 tell u this

***

XLVII.

i wanted so much
2 speech /
the hewman thyngs
/ i became the byrd soot / they sent me inn / this is wut makes us grls / thining bye the houre