feeld
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A NEW YORKER BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A VULTURE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018
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.
“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. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “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.
Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Language, artifice, and gender transition all come under scrutiny in this disarming and engrossing second collection from Charles (Safe Space). This 2017 National Poetry Series winner is composed in an idiosyncratic orthography ("a tran lik all metall is a series of sirfase in folde / wee call manie of thees foldes identitie") and loosely centered in a "feemale depositrie room." The collection undoes easy divisions between interior and exterior or science and nature, such as when the estrogen from a mare's urine becomes central to an ecosystem of gender transition usually thought of only in medical terms. As Charles writes, "i cant aford not 2/ nede / a mare." The poems' unusual spelling, a bravura pattern somewhere between Old English and modern phonetic, can be disorienting at first. But careful phrasing and simple forms studded with slashes draw the reader into the variety of possibilities these spelling choices offer, creating a surprising, if challenging, intimacy. Even seemingly straightforward spelling variations offer rich associations, such as when "our" becomes simply "r" or when "invagination" becomes "invagynation." Throughout, readers are subject to a careful recalibration of values, as Charles shows that a form is not important because it is static but rather because of the ways it changes, moves, and is perceived.
