- Jos is our old friend, former Poetry Center intern forever
and Poetry Center family.
And we're really glad they're back here where
we can celebrate all of their poetry world successes
since they've made the jump from Tucson
to LA-ish, to Long Beach.
Recently Jos won the 2016, this is
a long name so I'm looking down, Ruth Lilly
and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship
from the Poetry Foundation, which
is a big deal and the recent publication of "Safe Space",
which was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary
Award for transgender poetry.
Jos clearly deserves all of these accolades
and so much more.
Their poems are sharp and deep hearted,
filled with what Jeremy Cornelius in a review
refers to as tangled emotions, and what Asahta Press calls
a radicalized vulnerability.
The poems have the irreverence towards poetic and social mores
that are only possible after a poet has read and processed
and digested, and on occasion thoroughly dismissed
much of Western poetry and its theories.
Only then can a poem properly claim the category of eclogue,
only to follow it with tub of penis piston
and with suet alphabet, which is about right.
Jos' work is consistently charged with surging
but understated emotional openness matched
with its co-equal vulgarity.
Both Jos and Noah oscillate between a kind
of ancient vibe and a near future,
with surrealism not of some other world but of this one.
The surrealism of any current moment with its definitions
of, restrictions on, prescriptions
for having a body, anybody but especially
a trans body in this world that somehow hasn't quite
stretched to make space for sense of or safety
for all humans yet.