![]() 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. This was a Year that I did not want to end.-M. A layered work of fierce tenderness, a Year & other poemssimultaneously 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. 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, author of Deaf RepublicĪ 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. “I go / to put holly to the lip” she says, and she takes us readers along for the ride. Because a true understanding is always silence. It means Jos Charles is a kind of poet whose writing teach us to pay attention to our language again, because attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. 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. ![]()
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