Milkweed Editions, hardcover

Publication Date: March 15, 2022

Publisher Marketing:From the celebrated author offeeldcomes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.

Jos Charless poems communicate with one another as neurons do: sharp, charged, in language that predates language. A scandal / three cartons red / in a hedge / in / each the thousand eye research of flies. With acute lyricism, she documents how a person endures seemingly relentless devastationCalifornia wildfires, despotic legislation, housing insecurityamid illusions of safety. I wanted to believe, Charles declares, a corner a print leaned to / a corner can save / a people. Still the house falls apart. Death visits and lingers. Belief proves, again and again, that belief alone is not enough.

Yet miraculously, one might still manage to seekpropelled by love, or hope, or sometimes only momentumsomething better. There is a place where there are no futile longings, no persistent institutional threats to ones life. Poems might take us there; tenderness, too, as long as we can manage to keep moving. A current / gives as much as it has, writes Charlesdespite fire, despite loss.

Harrowing and gorgeous,a Year & other poemsis an astonishing new collection from a poet of unusual beauty and lyricism (New Yorker).