Released 30th April, 2024 // 978-1-916938-12-0 // 126 pages // RRP £10.99
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.
PRAISE for a Year & other poems:
‘Months / I move in you’ so begins this brilliant lyric cycle, a daybook, a hymnbook, a book of whispers to the dead and the living, a book of lullabies, of songs, of spells. I can tell you that Jos Charles is one of my most favorite living poets. But what does that mean? It means that Charles can see how our ‘world is / a lake the shape of / a lake’ and set it to music. It means that she makes me believe in pure lyric again. It means that Charles knows how silence speaks between the lines, between syllables, and shows it to us as the pages (and days of the year) turn. Here is a poet who is a cousin of Niedecker and Celan and Valentine, a maker of silences that speak, of grievances that lyric us. It means Jos Charles is a kind of poet whose writing teaches us to pay attention to our language again, because attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Because a true understanding is always silence. ‘I go / to put holly to the lip’ she says, and she takes us readers along for the ride. What a gift. Listen carefully to these pages, and you will find a ‘wind / on a microphone, ‘ and you will hear how ‘we wept / a quiet English / the day contained.’ What good luck to live in a time when such innermost music is made.
— Ilya Kaminsky
In a Year, Jos Charles writes of gratitude made wise by grief, grief made whole by joy. ‘Months / I move in you, ‘ she says—time is the subject, time is the beloved, time wraps its arms around us to soften our pain, diffuse our suffering. ‘When was it ever September, tides pouring over / When whales like men moved about the earth.’ There’s not another poet alive who could have written that, who could have built this astonishing monument to enduring, one moment at a time, despite. ‘In the street / they are starting fires It warms even us.’ Charles has given us another masterpiece. I sit, gratefully, at her feet.
— Kaveh Akbar
Jos Charles’ feeld was one of the great collections of the new century. This new book, in its beauty and importance, might well surpass it.
— Andrew McMillan
Measured in event and situated in survival, the poems of a Year & other poems contemplate form and the clock of calendar as they lyric and listen with thoughtful grief-rage. Of landscape and precarity, of naming and process, this quietly powerful verse cuts “like a scabbard we shuffle through.”
— Hoa Nguyen
A consummate craftsperson, Jos Charles crafts lines brief as a single syllable with a universe of meaning, where sentences do not know their end or beginning. A layered work of fierce tenderness, a Year & other poems simultaneously holds, and is held in place by, an inner framework of language that astonishingly and brilliantly is further deployed in the service of the language of the poems. This was a Year that I did not want to end.”
— M. NourbeSe Philip
Harrowing and gorgeous, a Year & other poems is an astonishing new collection from a poet of “unusual beauty and lyricism”.
— New Yorker
Spare and elegantly crafted, [Charles's] poems read like spotlights in the room of the page.
— Shondaland
[a Year & other poems is] astounding, the poems charged like the moment before a static shock, documenting losses, fears, and longings both personal and collective... I remain deeply moved by how carefully and intentionally Charles selects and places each syllable on the page, and by how that care extends to us as readers.
— Timothy Otte, Literary Hub
If Charles's previous book, the Pulitzer finalist feeld, employed Chaucerian language as a way of gaining lyrical access to time-traversing realms of consciousness, the poems here seek to strip language to its borderlines—between self and other, past and present, private and public—not to evanesce in abstraction but to hold the mind within contrarious states of being... The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry.
— David Woo, Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books blog
The luminous latest from Charles unfolds in a series of short lyrics over the course of a year, holding time's progression in a delicate balance with a changing self... Readers are asked to wade into the idiosyncratic language of another's mind, and to be transformed by it... Charles's abstract and elegiac lyricism lends beauty to these intriguing pages.
— Publishers Weekly
ABOUT Jos Charles:
Jos Charles is is the author of feeld, a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah, and Safe Space. In 2016 she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. Jos Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is a PhD student at the University of California Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, California.
