While, yes, others have used phonetic spelling before for other purposes, Feeld utilizes it in a breathtaking way that helps to fully embody its messages. There is a sense that Charles is carefully guiding the reader the way a parent slowly walks their young child out into the world with love and shared joy. While the language is admittedly difficult to initially grasp, Charles manages to make it a pleasant instead of laborious experience with form that encourages slow, careful reading at your own pace. Charles has a delicate construction that carefully uses both words and blank space to allow the poem to breath and give the reader space to sink into its beauty. Blooming with whimsical double entendres and searing social critique, this empowering and joyously inventive collection puns and probes its way deep into the hearts and minds of readers.įeeld delivers poetry that is simultaneously disorienting and familiar, softly moving through a garden of words at a slow pace as if to take it all in and bask within itself. Furthering the reclamation, Feeld is primarily poetry centered in nature, reclaiming the traditional cis male tradition of nature poetry for a trans space. While the use of language may sound daunting at first, there is a real pureness to it all and it is an utterly pleasant experience akin to childlike awe. Though, as said in her interview with Frontier Poetry, it is less about reclaiming but more ‘ identifying what is useful in what is adjacent’. The disarming use of language is ripe for interpretations, such as a representation of the disorientation for queerness in an obdurately gendered society enforced through rhetoric control of language, or the need to reappropriate language-’ a whord lost inn the mouthe off keepers-from the social gatekeepers. Poet Fady Joudah, who selected Feeld as winner of the National Poetry Series, describes the language as ‘ Chaucerian English into the digital twenty-first century,’ as Jos Charles plays with phonetics to reclaim language for a trans space.
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.
0 kommentar(er)
