feeld

“Through the strange labor of deciphering the text of feeld, I come to understand that Charles is transmitting an experience that I must allow to travel from her body into mine. When I do, the distance between us alters. It grows smaller and strangely charged. I’m made to realize that the very vernacular of the poems also tampers with history; it announces a continuum where Chaucer and 19th-century enslaved blacks and a 21st-century white trans woman seem quite effortlessly to share a lexicon.”

“Like the title of the collection, Jos Charles treats language like an open field, a clearing in which something new can be built. Her re-spellings embody this philosophy, challenging readers to explore the open spaces, new meanings and, perhaps, find their place in them.”

“Trans women, Jos Charles has said, are often viewed as “technological, new, invented.” They aren’t, of course, but the language around them can be. The 60 poems in Feeld demonstrate this, reflecting on the experience of a transgender woman by using metaphors largely taken from the garden and the field (or “feeld”). Such naturalistic imagery is of a piece with the Middle English poetry this work invokes, as in the opening lines of its first poem, which finds the speaker browsing clothes at a shopping mall and navigating its women’s bathroom […] The anachronistic phrasing seems like Chaucer but is largely of Charles’s own design — inflected with internet and text speak, often phonetic, full of dropped letters in some places and extra ones in others. In blending old (or “aynchent”) traditions with newer ones, Charles revises a literary tradition […]”

“[feeld] is a profound body of work that’s thought-provoking and wholly visceral. Ripe with natural imagery, surprising puns, and political statements that are jarring both in their truth and placement, feeld challenges the idea that writing about nature is only for straight, white, cis men.”

“A book unlike any other this year, feeld discovers novelty in the English language by looking backward… . [the poems] require the contemporary reader to engage in a perverse act of translation — from English to English. The result is a kind of poetic syllogism that formally enacts the absence of the transgender literary tradition. Innovative, dazzling, moving, this book is a knockout.”

“feeld is a book of translation, transition, and transformation. Charles manipulates syntax, syllable, and punctuation to open up the field of the page and to enter the larger conversation about gender, identity, and the boundary of the body. This is an incredible, important book that embodies the poetics of projective verse while creating its own language, syntax, and structure through not only the ear and the breath but also the stomach, the skin, and the non-physical essence of what it means to exist within a human body.”