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- Jos is our old friend, former
Poetry Center intern forever

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and Poetry Center family.

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And we're really glad
they're back here where

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we can celebrate all of
their poetry world successes

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since they've made
the jump from Tucson

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to LA-ish, to Long Beach.

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Recently Jos won
the 2016, this is

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a long name so I'm
looking down, Ruth Lilly

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and Dorothy Sargent
Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship

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from the Poetry
Foundation, which

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is a big deal and the recent
publication of "Safe Space",

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which was a finalist for
the 2016 Lambda Literary

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Award for transgender poetry.

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Jos clearly deserves
all of these accolades

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and so much more.

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Their poems are sharp
and deep hearted,

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filled with what Jeremy
Cornelius in a review

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refers to as tangled emotions,
and what Asahta Press calls

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a radicalized vulnerability.

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The poems have the irreverence
towards poetic and social mores

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that are only possible after
a poet has read and processed

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and digested, and on
occasion thoroughly dismissed

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much of Western poetry
and its theories.

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Only then can a poem properly
claim the category of eclogue,

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only to follow it with
tub of penis piston

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and with suet alphabet,
which is about right.

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Jos' work is consistently
charged with surging

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but understated emotional
openness matched

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with its co-equal vulgarity.

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Both Jos and Noah
oscillate between a kind

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of ancient vibe
and a near future,

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with surrealism not of some
other world but of this one.

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The surrealism of any current
moment with its definitions

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of, restrictions
on, prescriptions

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for having a body,
anybody but especially

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a trans body in this world
that somehow hasn't quite

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stretched to make space
for sense of or safety

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for all humans yet.