Step-by-step redirections, detours, digressions. You show us that language can be a transitional feeld, like our own trans bodies. Like a child, you treat words like Lego blocks and build your own “whorld.” Jack Halberstam makes a delightful trans* metaphor out of Legos his most recent book : “The world of Lego is one of constant transition, and while there is always the possibility of returning to the instruction sheet and following the step-by-step directions, the uncharted territory of creation always beckons.” This is what you do with language: throw out the instruction guide, enter uncharted territory. Your gleeful misspellings also invoke a childlike innocence: preadolescent glory days when perhaps the pleasures of our bodies was not so thoroughly delimited. Certainly your Medievalist background as a scholar comes to the fore-and indeed, I’ve seen multiple reviews describe your work as “Chaucerian.” Nevertheless, this assessment feels reductive to me: your homophony relishes in myriad possibilities-makes room for other influences like Louis Zukofsky (his Catullus sequence) and Tommy Pico (his text lingo). Flux language, queer language, dense/dance language: graphically compressed, sonically ambiguous.

Yours is a language made strange: stretched and slanted and folded against itself so it veers in and out of recognizability. By which I mean I am carrying your book, carrying you with me as I cross my own feelds (trans-latio: to carry across). By which I mean reading your book leaves me in a constant act of effortful yet fruitful trans*lation. I’m feeld-ing your book, by which I mean I am fielding your queeries and questyons and also I am catching feelings. Jos Charles, there’s room in “thees wite skirtes” for thee and me, so let’s write these rites alchemically.

Jos charles