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, and that poetry has to mean something. Much more than an exercise in toying with readers’ emotions, Charles’ new collection "feeld," released today by Milkweed Editions, is a profound body of work that’s thought-provoking and wholly visceral. "Please don't read the book if that's gonna be the case. Sure, she wanted to provoke some anxiety by writing "considering" as "considrynge" and "women" as "wymon," but "hopefully not actual induced panic or something," she says. She resides in Long Beach, CA.A book of poems written in 14th century English - think Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" - might sound daunting, but poet Jos Charles doesn’t want you to be afraid. Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a PhD student at UC Irvine. She currently teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program. His lines, for me, are very useful, and beautiful.” His work is and has an afterlife-like turning, leaning in, and whispering a word as the world ends. His late poems especially are such precise, descriptive objects-and astoundingly, after 1945, after the death camps, and in German.
It’s a poetry brimming with possibility-connections to one’s history, past, memory, but also what is to be done. 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. 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. Charles's poetry has appeared in Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere.
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. 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).
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