"There’s a certain strain of millennial… dismissiveness throughout," she says.
It captures a sense of loss - and it also makes for some pretty funny turns of phrase. The old style, she says, highlights the ways in which trans people have been left out of written narratives, both fictionalized and historical. (Sometimes, it's enough to just sound good.)Ĭharles' choice to write in Chaucerian English, as it turns out, wasn’t just to befuddle readers, either. 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. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.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.
"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. In Charles's electrifying transliteration of English-Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect-what is old is made new again. "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. 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. FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
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