Milk Hours: Poems

The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that explores what it means to exist in a state of loss, featuring unlikely neighbors such as Hegel and Murakami, Melville and al-Sufi, and engaging with science, geography, art, and aesthetics. It asks timely and universal questions about being human in a time of political and environmental upheaval, and how we make meaning in such boundaries.

Format: Paperback / softback
Publication date: 24 June 2021
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an exquisite debut that explores extensively to inquire about the essence of existence in a state of loss. "We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery." Thus 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?

Weight: 128g
Dimension: 140 x 215 x 9 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781571315366