a Year & other poems

by Jos Charles

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 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 ).

Genres: Poetry, Transgender, American, LGBT

96 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2022

About the author

Jos Charles is a trans poet, editor, and author of feeld, a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah and Safe Space, a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.

Reviews

[Ada · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea.

Poemes molt curts i tan fragmentats que sovint m'han deixat aïllada, per molt que els llegís i rellegís. No soc de les que pensa que has d'entendre la poesia perquè t'agradi, però en aquest cas no he pogut disfrutar massa, tampoc, del propi llenguatge.
Amb això no dic que no m'hagi agradat gens. Alguns dels poemes son molt evocadors i quan et deixen entrar notes tota la seva esplendor. Hi ha imatges brillants. En cert sentit m'ha recordat a Anne Michaels, per la brevetat i l'opacitat.

[Basia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The poem is perhaps," Jos Charles hypothesizes, "a room." And the rooms of A Year are quiet and sparse, made hollow by uncertainty, its attendant fear, and grief. But in other rooms, Charles makes a generous offering, where she places a beloved in a poem to climb a tree and devour grapefruit, and suddenly the poem becomes a space for not recounting what's gone, what's going, and what remains, but a site of play and possibility—a place where grief gets reversed. Still, most of A Year concerns emptiness and what to make of it in a burning world crowded with chaos, the syntax stuttering along.

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this brain jazz

I put you into a poem
You climbed the giantest tree

I put a dozen grapefruit into a tree
You ate every one There is a letter

in a desk I cannot know
One day I will

[Momo · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5/5
I really just did not enjoy this. I didn't hate this but I also just didn't like any whole poem from this collection. There were like four parts of certain poems that I liked but it just isn't for me. I like most poetry and prose as long as they aren't too classical sounding but this wasn't even that, it was just confusing and it felt like reading an essay you wrote at 2 am the next day. I think the cover is beautiful which is why I picked it up from my library's 2022 poetry releases section and I had liked the one poem that I read part of but I guess I just got fortunate with what I opened it up to. If this book weren't so short I would have put it down it after the first few poems.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like "feeld" before it, this poetry pulls and drags forward and back, rolls out and folds in on itself like the tides, and is as lyrical. Syntax and imagery propel the motion. "& other poems" bracket "a Year" in a sort of prologue and epilogue. "a Year" reads like brief diary entries—five for each month—that mean to invoke more than tell an intimate story, to keep it alive vs setting it in stone, as if creating, by way of language, waystations to help memory as immediate and effective as sound and smell.

[Bill Shultz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this and went to put it back on the shelf, feeling apathetic or maybe frustrated by what felt arhythmic on the first read through. Then I remembered that it's good to read poetry more than once and differently. Read aloud, slowly, with total attention on one word at a time, this book turns into a beautiful piece of quiet music. I'm very glad I started again.

[Nicholas Montemarano]

It's National Poetry Month. Poetry, especially at this point in my life, is my favorite genre to read. This is a beautifully designed book by a publisher I admire. I read wonderful things about this book. I bought it with such anticipation, expecting/hoping to love it. But the truth is: I'm pretty sure I don't understand 90% of it. And I'm a writer/author/college professor whose reading tastes and writing tend toward the unconventional. In other words, I enter every book I read open-minded, open-hearted. Still, I read each line, each word, in a fog. I always tell my students: Poetry is not meant to be summarized or restated; it is what it is, first word to last, that is what a poem "means." A poem is a language experience that resurrects our emotions. Even so, this particular language experience simply did not reach me. Tolstoy's famous definition of art as the transfer of emotion from writer to reader: here, that transfer did not happen. I want to make clear: In no way do I see this as a failure of the writer, or as my failure as a reader. In no way am I saying that this is not a "good" book (whatever that means). I am saying, simply, that I did not feel a connection with the words on the page. Certainly others have, but I felt that this book kept me at arm's length. I did not feel welcome into its world.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poet, Jos Charles, as I see her in this book and her previous book, feeld, is like one of those people who builds model ships in a bottle. "Like" because it's not so much the elaborate intricacy I admire in her poems. It's the care and gesture toward the meticulous. Or the articulate. Jos Charles is this poet of measured articulation. And in feeld I found myself entirely absorbed in the poems, and imagery, and extended logic of that imagery as I made my way through the book. In a Year, I see that same stance towards subject. I can hear the consideration of others' dying, the closely felt loss. But I am not able to catch the poems' rhythms to feel myself fully absorbed in the work. It may be this is by design. That an extended consideration of loss can be an abstracted state.

However, I'm not sure the poetic significance of the year I'm being escorted through. There doesn't seem to be a change from one month to the next. There are vague references to seasonal descriptions. But those references don't feel integrated into the poem's mechanics--something I would imagine happening in a book so solidly framing a year. And, granted, the first book that comes to mind using "year" as a structural element is Stacy Szymaszek's a year from today. Admittedly, these are very different styles to be juxtaposing. But at least showing how a long poem can be engaged with a year so it exists in the grain of the poem is relevant.

I recognize I am reading this book in the shadow of Charles's feeld. Which I have taught multiple times. Which continues to captivate me. But the recurring imagery of feeld, and the pacing, and the absolute slow-down of reading is what I came into a Year anticipating. This kind of anticipation may prove my personal unfairness to the book. That said, I am the forever 5-star devotee to what Charles writes. The shift from Safe Space to feeld is absolutely remarkable. And where I am in sync with the poems of a Year, I feel traction and velocity and sinewy-ness I am captivated by.

[willowdog · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetry is a very personal thing. What we get from it is what we come to it with. I'll be the first to not always appreciate modern poetry of free verse. I found this work very hard to get a handle on, but that is mostly because of my lack of understanding of the form. I spent a lot of time looking at the structure of the poetry. Although the long poem A Year follows the narrative of the months of a year, I had trouble determining the relationships of the narrative. And maybe, there isn't one. It is an example of really post modern poetry in a sense that the role of the reader is definitely challenged. Read for the challenge!

Thanks to Edelweiss for this ebook in exchange for a unbiased review.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. It physically hurt to hit those two stars because I wanted so badly to love this. I don’t think I knew for even a moment where I was during this book. There was no breath spared for the moments that anchor the reader. Just sheer motion and passing noise, though these were as artful as expected.

HOWEVER, since the ebooks Edelweiss sends are not always the best vehicle for poetry (see: literally never, though kindly and freely provided) I am desperate to give this one a paper chance when it comes out. Because I can see the moments here, no matter how fleeting.

[sophia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m still getting the feel of poems they are not for everyone but they are most definitely for me. I love the emotions they emit through pause and metaphors but this one didn’t do it for me. I have to admit it still figuring out exactly what the purpose of the book was but I didn’t hate it. So here I leave you with my favorite poem from the book:

“I wanted to believe a corner a print leaned to a corner can save
a people
The revolution to each stagnancy my romancing
the condo on the block placing only the limit of its form
Questions
within the body you forget breaks holding breaks in the wall”

and this one too

“Remembered september or november Any
month the same really
Like working the street a bar free drinks from creeps at the bar
Together a laugh lodged in air Taste of blood copper rain This existence
sister a theft
The Friday you left the rain picking up hasn't been the same”

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 2 out of 5]

ARC given by Edelweiss+ for Honest Review
[2.5 stars]

A very personal look at a year through lyrical prose and poetry.

The free verse, while beautifully written, seemed a bit outdone as some poems ended up more confusing than understandable from a reader perspective. I found I was able to follow the narrative somewhat, but would get lost in some of the overly personal language.

I was a fan of the lines:
"I had not
begun to think past
testament of want
I didn't want
I believed sentences knew their end"
They are simple yet powerful and let me understand Charles' look at finality.

My other favorite poem is "A New York Poem."

(Also this was labeled as LGBTQ but I was not able to recognize that theme in the book.)

[Lea · Rating 2 out of 5]

“If I have misspoke let me | be clear”
I didn’t find much to be clear. At first I wasn’t going to rate this because I felt like I didn’t get it. I couldn’t make sense of the structure or even put it together as coherent thought. But then there were a few poems, or pages of the year poem and the other poems that made complete sense to me and I identified the structure and the meaning. It really left me wanting more. Selfishly maybe, that it was more accessible to me as a reader. I could feel good and powerful intent but I couldn’t quite access it for myself. So the 2 star is for me and I hope that other readers find it more to their liking.

I purchased this from Milkweed during poetry month because it was said to include subjects like wildfire and California, which it did, sort of.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems speak silence, speak space, the life inbetween, the loss. And what is left are lines
layered into song, contemplating time.

“Awaiting now clarity but the shadow of something clear…
It is not for wont of
understanding I place notes to turn to after this”

“I read I
long so
much for my beloved dead
ones The day of miracle being
past The day a plot a grove
we make & know which breath held time”

“What was crossed out is not the same
as what was never written down
Mountains mind even us”

[Jessica Brusven · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a difficult book to rate. Charles is a talented writer and is a celebrated poet. I love poetry, but I’m not educated in the nuances. As a result, my rating is reflecting not this book’s merit and just my personal relationship to the text. I found it difficult to follow and the random words with capitalization were confusing. I struggling to understand the meaning and themes. I think readers with more poetry expertise will find this deeply brilliant, I just went over my head! I will try other work by Charles as I did enjoy the poems at the very end of the book.

[Lo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jos Charles writes something I had to reread over and over again. “a Year” poem was mind blowing in just its relation of a home to a body but also the metaphors appearing to be obvious with so much more beneath. The style is beautiful but again not easily comprehensible and I wouldn’t have been to able comprehend without Eli. But as the poem “January” says, she doesn’t want to be understood but to just be.

[Mikael · Rating 4 out of 5]

i like this kind of book. written in the aftermath (slipstream?) of a veritable masterpiece (feeld, written in millennial chaucer), there's sometimes a certain kind of freedom to be disarmingly open, artifice-ignoring (though can still embrace it when needs be), bare (ruined choir of it all) — it could be a placeholder for another, even bigger magnum opus, but what a place on its own

[Erin Pacitti]

Really interesting use of form in poetry, but the actual work went over my head. I had a hard time following or understanding the poems (even a little bit) so I quickly lost interest. Beautiful book, but not for me!

[Bailey :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jos Charles is one of the most fascinating poets writing in English today. This book is gorgeous.

[Robin]

In this slender volume of Charles's work, poems of fragmented thought and interrupted feelings document the passing of time.

[Babs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Open to interpretation free verse poetry. Not for all, more take from it what you will.

[PT · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeahhh idk

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not great, just meh. It feels like the same tone throughout which gets boring quickly. Disappointing because I loved feeld.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remembered January or July—any month the same, really—these gauzy impressions express at times “the logic of cloud,” at others “the logic of a window shade.”

Favorite Poem:
“December”

[Sarah Yeaste · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you love the abstract and obscure, then this is the poetry collection for you. I’ve had the honor of hearing Jos read from her collection in work, and she is absolutely wonderful.

[Jes · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a stunning book. Wow.

[Alellujah · Rating 2 out of 5]

some good lines but overall not my tempo

[Chel · Rating 1 out of 5]

the poetry in this book was too abstract for me to understand. it required a lot of imagination and deep thought, so if that’s your thing, this is the book for you.

otherwise, steer away.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

the style of poetry that I find too abstract to connect to. loved the words but just could not get into a flow