Sean Hill at AWP 2014 (intro by Wayne Miller)

Sara Eliza Johnson at AWP 2014 (intro by Martha Collins)

Sally Keith at AWP 2014 (intro by Adam Clay)

Rebecca Dunham at AWP 2014 (intro by Patricia Kirkpatrick)

Patricia Kirkpatrick at AWP 2014 (intro by Peter Campion)

Murray Farish at AWP 2014 (intro by Daniel Slager)

Michael Garriga at AWP 2014 (intro by Patrick Thomas)

Martha Collins at AWP 2014

Lee Ann Roripaugh at AWP 2014 (intro by Rebecca Dunham)

Author thanks from AWP 2014

https://milkweed.org/book/the-milk-hours

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.

Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?

The Milk Hours: Poems

Audiobook Sample from The Milk Hours by John James: "Chthonic"

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Audiobook Sample from The Milk Hours by John James: "Chthonic"

Milkweed Editions

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