feeld

“A wholly avant-garde book of poetry that reveals a queer history embedded in the castaway detritus of our language.” —Bookpage

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A New Yorker Best Poetry Book of the Year

A Vulture Best Poetry Book of 2018

A Library Journal Best Book of 2018

“A book like none other: in a personalized version of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century English, Charles, a transgender woman, renders poems of unusual beauty and lyricism. . . . This is my current favorite book of 2018.” -TheNew Yorker

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.

“All poetry aims to refresh, reframe, even revolutionize language, but in an effort to find a new and better way to discuss the trans experience, Charles goes farther than most . . . This book will shape the conversation on poetry and can make other collections feel ordinary, but its challenges are best left to serious poetry lovers.” —Library Journal