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The Milk Hours: Poems
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 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 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?
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Hardcover
Published June 4, 2019
About the author
John James
319 books10 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 20, 2019
Pensive but inquisitive, THE MILK HOURS is a debut poetry collection about loss, the intimacy of art and dreams, and the vulnerable space of new life.
What does it mean to live in a state of loss, when the two are nearly imcompatible? That's the overarching question in THE MILK HOURS: Poems, a debut collection from John James (Milkweed Editions, June 2019). Populated with living, grieving things, THE MILK HOURS is scattered with roots, bodies, and concealed histories. There are cemeteries and the milky breath of babies. We taste art and geography, and crunch on gravel, and are moved through dream sequences and religious myth and story.
James takes science and nature and cleaves it into something new, something at once beautiful, but destructive. How do we make meaning in this world--to whom do we turn? Each other? Can those boundaries collapse?
THE MILK HOURS is sparsely, yet densely written. It's at once lush and stark, full of metaphor and unsettled-ness. James has such a fabulous and unique grasp of language, a shifting perspective on nature, fecundity, and decay. This collection will move you, but it might also generate more questions than answers, which I think might be the point.
For all my reviews, including author interviews, please see: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.
What does it mean to live in a state of loss, when the two are nearly imcompatible? That's the overarching question in THE MILK HOURS: Poems, a debut collection from John James (Milkweed Editions, June 2019). Populated with living, grieving things, THE MILK HOURS is scattered with roots, bodies, and concealed histories. There are cemeteries and the milky breath of babies. We taste art and geography, and crunch on gravel, and are moved through dream sequences and religious myth and story.
James takes science and nature and cleaves it into something new, something at once beautiful, but destructive. How do we make meaning in this world--to whom do we turn? Each other? Can those boundaries collapse?
THE MILK HOURS is sparsely, yet densely written. It's at once lush and stark, full of metaphor and unsettled-ness. James has such a fabulous and unique grasp of language, a shifting perspective on nature, fecundity, and decay. This collection will move you, but it might also generate more questions than answers, which I think might be the point.
For all my reviews, including author interviews, please see: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.
August 21, 2019
REVIEW FORTHCOMING
November 13, 2021
The Milk Hours is a finely calibrated text of lyrical witness that investigates how our coming and going in the world, even more so for our loved ones, is gauged in relation to the abundance and poverty of our language: "Cattail, heartseed," says the speaker of the title and opening poem -- "these words mean nothing to me." Moving beyond naming to the liminal spaces of a Chilean volcano spouting ash, tree sex, and ghost talk, James is heir to Bishop's painterly eye and Hopkin's symphonic ear, and his masterful, musical poems wrestle with the weight of History through the acutely-scaled, meditative observations of an unobtrusive speaker, "attesting to the actual world" while proclaiming new beginnings and the survival of sensibility and hope, tentative like the new shoots of a plant: "All we ever needed was a start."
September 7, 2019
You need to be willing to sit with this collection, with James—as one does when another is in grief. You wait for them to speak. Time is not on your terms. Then, perhaps, will the person in pain open up to you.
THE MILK HOURS is a slow burn that elevates in intensity as the collection progresses. I won't lie—I tried to jump ahead in the collection for something to grab me, but that's not how this collection operates; jumping ahead leads to disorientation. It's SO worth it to see it through to the end.
I completely understand why Henri Cole picked this for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. It's brilliant—but you must have patience and a listening ear. Otherwise, like many quiet but important things, it will get passed over.
THE MILK HOURS is a slow burn that elevates in intensity as the collection progresses. I won't lie—I tried to jump ahead in the collection for something to grab me, but that's not how this collection operates; jumping ahead leads to disorientation. It's SO worth it to see it through to the end.
I completely understand why Henri Cole picked this for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. It's brilliant—but you must have patience and a listening ear. Otherwise, like many quiet but important things, it will get passed over.
September 11, 2019
With succinct but distinctive phrases Mr. James evocatively gives the reader a fractured sense of the whole story while at the same time delivering an emotional homage to memories.
March 14, 2021
Okay collection 💁
June 21, 2021
SO beautiful. holy geez. so many stunning poems in such a short volume. particularly loved "metamorphoses," "le moribond," "end," and "poem around which everything is structured."
June 25, 2021
beautiful. i read this one sitting, and some of those poems really stuck out to me.. one line even made me shed a tear.
‘home is a question and we’re drifting from it.’
‘home is a question and we’re drifting from it.’
May 18, 2021
Stunning, lyric book worthy of your time. John James is a great writer to know in our times.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews