a Year & other poems, milkweed editions, 2022

Here is a poet who is a cousin of Niedecker and Celan and Valentine, a maker of silences that speak, of grievances that lyric us. […] What good luck to live in a time when such innermost music is made.—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

A layered work of fierce tenderness, a Year & other poems simultaneously holds, and is held in place by, an inner framework of language that astonishingly and brilliantly is further deployed in the service of the language of the poems. This was a Year that I did not want to end.—M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!

A Year & Other Poems contemplates form and the clock of calendar as they lyric and listen with thoughtful grief-rage. Of landscape and precarity, of naming and process, this quietly powerful verse cuts “like a scabbard we shuffle through.”—Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

If Charles’s previous book, the Pulitzer finalist feeld, employed Chaucerian language as a way of gaining lyrical access to time-traversing realms of consciousness, the poems [in a Year & other poems] seek to strip language to its borderlines—between self and other, past and present, private and public […] The result is a beautiful, elemental poetry that navigates the eponymous year, witnessing the travails of an afflicted, declining nation.—David Woo, Poetry Foundation

interview on NPR
write up on Literary Hub by Timothy Otte
excerpt featured on Poetry Daily

a Poetry Foundation review by David Woo
interview on Montana Public Radio
a Publisher’s Weekly recommendation

feeld, milkweed editions, 2018

Dazzling . . . In Charles' hands, the language itself transitions, defamiliarized, and in its new spellings it opens to a poly-vocality where words contain hidden meanings. – Paris Review

[feeld is] a totally new sound . . . an unprecedented syntax to accommodate an unprecedented experience. Every poet gropes their way towards this kind of sui generis utterance, but so few of us achieve it so absolutely. — Kaveh Akbar, American Poetry Review 

Jos Charles bends language, via willful spelling, to a place where it must be parsed slowly, struggled through, read not so much with the brain as the mouth. Language becomes a felt thing, a terrain to be crossed. — Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate

feeld is in elite company, and is arguably unheralded in its lyric inventiveness... A rare find that will be felt and studied for a long while — Fady Joudah

National Poetry Series Winner
finalist for 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry
finalist for 2019 LA Times Book Prize in Poetry
starred review from Publisher's Weekly
new and noteworthy roundup at New York Times
interview and review on PBS News Hour
writeup at the Paris Review
ten questions on Poets & Writers

review by BK Fischer at Kenyon Review
review by Noa/h Fields at VIDA
review by Jordan Nakamura at Lunch Ticket
interview and review by Molly Savard at Shondaland
interview with S. Yarberry at BOMB
roundup at Bustle
roundup at New York Review of Books
roundup at NYLON
review by rob mclennan
book trailer

safe space, ahsahta press, 2016

Is it risk when the writing feels like the only way to stay alive. . . Jos Charles announces early in this collection that their american / corpse has been such / a disappointment. These poems know well enough that not everyone would demur so over the dead American. [T]hese poems abide in the persistent actual, goading us to grow the shapes we need, whispering with what I have to call a social magic, even carrots do it. —Farid Matuk

Sutures sewn and ripped and sewn again, these are the poems you and I know we have been awaiting, the poet Jos whose anvil gets hammered inside us all the way. You are going to smell everything stronger no matter what you smell, you have entered this book because you do not want the world to ever be the same.—CAConrad

debut poetry collection from Ahsahta Press
review at Scout Poetry
review by T.m. Lawson at Angel City Review
micro review at New Delta Review

finalist for LAMBDA Literary Awards
review by rob mclennan
review at Queen Mob's Tea House