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John James presents The Milk Hours

July 25, 2019 | 7:00 pm

Free

Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed poet JOHN JAMES for a discussion of his award-winning debut collection, The Milk Hours.

About The Milk Hours

“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 Hourssets 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?

Details

Date:
July 25, 2019
Time:
7:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Event Category:
Website:
http://www.harvard.com/event/john_james/

Organizer

Harvard Book Store
Phone:
6176611515
Email:
info@harvard.com
Website:
harvard.com

Venue

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
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Website:
www.harvard.com

Did You Know?

Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.