a Year & other poems

“how / words might sculpt sculpt midair,” Jos Charles writes in “I’d Climb to See” from her third collection, a Year & other Poems, in which vistas of language shape more than a difficult year’s landscapes of love and loss. 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. “A proximity / to what one is not / to bury oneself / to,” as she writes in “May.”

If sculpting words midair or immersing oneself in the proximity of an otherness are metaphysical tasks, they are also transcendences that poets yearn for and readers seek from poetry. In a Year & other Poems, the speaker’s struggles toward selfhood as a trans person, one whose identity is arrived at in adversity, form a captivating backdrop to Charles’s elucidation of liminal spaces. In the section “July,” the speaker describes the lonely period when she sought full manifestation of her true “form”:

a woman waiting unholds your form a man’s bathroom
               I’m always in
               empty summer
               homes by the sea

The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry that navigates the eponymous year, witnessing the travails of an afflicted, declining nation (“daily the news Rome has fallen,” the speaker notes in “April”) and alighting on a “you” who may be a beloved, oneself, or a past identity that the self has subsumed, as in the speaker’s delicate sorrow over a changed name from her changeless past (“March”):

         I had not begun to answer
         what is the same (it
is your mouth only that has changed)
         Joshua oh
         Joshua
         oh