Jos Charles, a Year & other poems

 

 

Rosemary
dead     Naomi at the clinic
            Leah in hospice in bed
            & debt   Throwing a book
            to the thresher a poet read
            So much less than our
            nakedness        a chorus
                                    a garland
                                    of changing names (“January”)

I was very excited to go through Long Beach, California poet and editor Jos Charles’ latest, a Year & other poems (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2022), following her remarkable debut safe space (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and follow-up, feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Writing the space of a calendar year through lyric suites of accumulated bursts, bookended by an assembly or shorter poems, there is such a precision to a Jos Charles lyric, one not condensed but carefully and deliberately set into the form of song. “Awaiting / not clarity,” she writes, as part of “January,” “but mineral a membrane [.]” There is such an enormous amount of space in her seemingly-spare lyric, writing out the way grief moves, and the space of a year, the space of grief itself: “me where the limit / begins reminded of proportion / the politics of proportion” (“June”).

The bulk of this collection is composed as a year’s worth of monthly-titled lyric fragments that accumulate into a larger shape of grief and loss. “Heard a pool deflate,” she writes, in part of the opening fragment of “February,” “Monday you would be / twenty-eight  Open //// door electric fan in it [.]” Jos Charles is easily one of the finest poets working the physical shape and sound of the lyric, and one of the back cover blurbs references an echo of the work of Lorine Niedecker, which seems entirely appropriate (although I would suggest, also, an echo of the physicality of works by CAConrad, including their latest, Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibrations [see my review of such here]); Charles has the ability to form a thin and angular lyric into such physical, earthen shapes, as though they have always existed, simply awaiting our ability to comprehend.