Zachary Charles

In their debut collection, Twentyfour Self Portraits at Twentyfour, Zach Charles refracts a becoming-adult identity through a child-mind-taking-in-the-rippling-tide-of-the Salish-Sound-Sea kaleidoscope of nonlinear selves and more-than-human contexts. Through a serial interweaving of ritual poetic self-portraits and Alki-tide reflections and letters to their late "Grandpa G.", Zach manages to both wrestle with and embrace their ancestral lineage and in the process get lost in and find solidarity with “rivers like pages or minds,”  with the soon-to-be-born-again vegetative corpses that ride the “hearse of all hearses” city compost truck line, with would-be-apocalypse-fossilized Tyson-processed dino-chickens, and an infinite regression of turtles and moose and frog and dark sacred night galaxies belted out Satchmo-esque in Henri Selmer B-flat custom-made Beautiful World trumpeting for tidewater, and in between all those mirrored becomings amid trees of green and algae and moonlit anemones, the infinite opens the Throat Chakra “swollen like an overripe gourd, threatening to burst.”