In her 2019 poetry collection Feeld, the trans poet and translator Jos Charles pushes the exploration of linguistic malleability in extraordinary ways. Much of the work for a poet is to probe the undercurrents of reality through transformative language, making language malleable as an abstract expression to the abstractness of life. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body. “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. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English-Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect-what is old is made new again. “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. 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.
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