Chax Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing: New Collection from award winning poet and publisher, author of Pushing Water.

“Charles Alexander’s brilliant new work, TIME BEING, creates, reimagines, and reassembles the world (this world and more than this world) into astonishingly graceful song. This work braids sweetness, laughter, political awareness. I can’t think of any other poet who writes with such playful vitality, creating a fullness of representation that embodies consciousness, presence, passion, and compassion. Alexander’s gorgeous abstraction, his simplicity and directness, create a fullness of representation that makes the world is a book palpable: tangy, fully present, slipping away, coming back: 'lucky to begin / in the middle / of an ocean / triple lucky with such love amid the blue // the words are best kept in poems / most explosive there / most wanting / most saving.' The roots of lyric are here, made familiar and completely new: 'over hill over dale / the ravaged western / place of speed and missiles // occident and orient / all the way to the / global capital spittoon.' Time Being is a great book. We need these poems now, and always.” —Joseph Lease