John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole as winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Chthonic, winner of the 2014 CutBank Chapbook Award. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Best American Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. Also a digital collagist, his visual art is forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, and LIT. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, in dialogue with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, as well as the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.
