A Year & Other Poems
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...The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry that navigates the eponymous year, witnessing the travails of an afflicted, declining nation 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.
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Not as strikingly original in concept and language as feeld, this new collection adheres to a more personal, intimate aesthetic ('Our separate smoke/ caught/ in the same ascent') that may or may not connect with any given reader...Still, Charles remains a serious experimental poet who has tasked herself with the challenge of creating 'a language capable of itself.'
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These poems endure, as the poet has endured, loss and devastation—California wildfires, housing insecurity, the death of loved ones...The strength of this collection lies in its silence, its whispers, its defiant hope, a search for something more, something better.
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