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    a Year & other poems
    a Year & other poems
    a Year & other poems
    Ebook97 pages34 minutes

    a Year & other poems

    By Jos Charles

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    About this ebook

    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.

    Harrowing and gorgeous, a Year & other poems is an astonishing new collection from a poet of “unusual beauty and lyricism” (New Yorker).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateMar 15, 2022
    ISBN9781571317667
    a Year & other poems
    Author

    Jos Charles

    Jos Charles is the author of a Year and other poems and feeld, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah. She is also the author of Safe Space, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In 2016, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. Jos Charles received an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, California.

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      Book preview

      a Year & other poems - Jos Charles

      Cover: a Year & other poems by Jos Charles

      Also by Jos Charles

      feeld

      Safe Space

      a Year

      & other poems

      Jos Charles

      MILKWEED EDITIONS

      © 2022, Text by Jos Charles

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

      (800) 520-6455

      milkweed.org

      Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions

      Printed in Canada

      Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

      Cover art: Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978), Untitled, 1960s, watercolor on paper, 9 5/8 x 12 1/8 inches, The Columbus Museum, Georgia; Gift of Miss John Maurice Thomas in memory of her parents John H. and Amelia W. Cantey Thomas and her sister Alma Woodsey Thomas G.1994.20.42

      22 23 24 25 26 5 4 3 2 1

      First Edition

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Charles, Jos, 1988– author.

      Title: A year: & other poems / by Jos Charles.

      Description: First Edition. | Minneapolis, Missesota: Milkweed Editions, 2022. | Summary: "From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously

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