From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.

Jos Charles is a trans poet and writer. Their debut poetry collection, Safe Space, is available from Ahsahta Press (2016). They are founding-editor of THEM, a trans literary journal. Their poetry has been published with POETRY, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, GLAAD, LAMBDA Literary, and elsewhere. In 2016 they received a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. Jos Charles received an MFA from the University of Arizona. They reside in Long Beach, CA. 

Jos's selections From the Stacks are:

Narrow Road to the Interior  by Matsuo Bashō

Lightdurress by Paul Celan

Negro Marfil/Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona

Homage to Etel Adnan edited by Lindsey Boldt, Steve Dickison & Samantha Giles

Black Salt by Édouard Glissant

Reports by Wong May

Robert Lax: New Poems 1962/1985 by Robert Lax

Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness by bob kaufman

The Cow by Ariana Reines

Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Fady Joudah