Jos Charles’ latest, a Year & other poems, is available now from Milkweed Editions.

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. It means Jos Charles is a kind of poet whose writing teach us to pay attention to our language again, because attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Because a true understanding is always silence. “I go / to put holly to the lip” she says, and she takes us readers along for the ride. What a gift. Listen carefully to these pages, and you will find a “wind / on a microphone” and you will hear how “we wept / a quiet English / the day contained.” What good luck to live in a time when such innermost music is made.—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

A consummate craftsperson, Jos Charles crafts lines brief as a single syllable with a universe of meaning, where sentences do not know their end or beginning. A layered work of fierce tenderness, a Year & other poemssimultaneously 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!

Measured in event and situated in survival, the poems of “A Year & Other Poems” contemplate 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

In A Year, Jos Charles writes of gratitude made wise by grief, grief made whole by joy. “Months / I move in you,” she says—time is the subject, time is the beloved, time wraps its arms around us to soften our pain, diffuse our suffering. “When was it ever September, tides pouring over / When whales like men moved about the earth.” There’s not another poet alive who could have written that, who could have built this astonishing monument to enduring, one moment at a time, despite. “In the street / they are starting fires It warms even us.” Charles has given us another masterpiece. I sit, gratefully, at her feet.—Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell: Poems