Jos Charles
“There are other ways to order the world than what the rules of a language may allow.”
Jos Charles
(c) Sergio De La Torre
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“Harrowing and gorgeous, a Year & other poems is an astonishing new collection from a poet of unusual beauty and lyricism.”
“…luminous…Charles’s abstract and elegiac lyricism lends beauty to these intriguing pages.”
“Could we say Jos 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.”
“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.”
Jos Charles is author of a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah, and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is the founding-editor of THEM, the first trans literary journal in the US, and engages in direct gender justice work with a variety of organizations and performers. Charles's poetry has appeared in Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards are the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2015 Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship.
In an interview with LAMBDA, Charles was asked about the influence of Paul Celan on her work: “Celan writes a kind of hope that’s an antidote to what we are now saturated in: liberal, bad faith hope. It’s a poetry brimming with possibility—connections to one’s history, past, memory, but also what is to be done. His late poems especially are such precise, descriptive objects—and astoundingly, after 1945, after the death camps, and in German. His work is and has an afterlife—like turning, leaning in, and whispering a word as the world ends. His lines, for me, are very useful, and beautiful.”
She currently teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program. Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a PhD student at UC Irvine. She resides in Long Beach, CA.
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a Year & other poems
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feeld
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Safe Space
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