Lakewood Book Club: The Milk Hours by John James

About The Lakewood Book Club

Join us for our seasonal Lakewood Book Club. Selected books vary in style and perspective, covering anything from living in the presence of death and dying, to local history or cemetery history. Get ready to learn and connect with our amazing community at this special event. Treats and coffee provided!

Registration is required - spaces are limited.

You will need to purchase your own copy of the book (or audio book) to read ahead of the event. We encourage shopping locally at Magers & Quinn or other area booksellers.

Depending on the number of attendees, we will either have a large group discussion or break out into smaller groups. Discussion questions and topics will be provided to spark conversation, but we encourage you to bring your own questions as well!

About This Month's Book

The Milk Hours by John James

(locally published poetry; reflections on life and death, parent loss as a child, collective grief)

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 timeless. 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?

Location

The Lakewood Book Club will be onsite at Lakewood. We will announce the exact location closer to the event.

The Lakewood Heritage Foundation

This event is sponsored in part by the Lakewood Heritage Foundation, which supports educational programming and the preservation and restoration of Lakewood’s landscape, art, architecture and public spaces—for the benefit of all.

FAQs

Can anyone attend this event?

All are welcome - you do not need to be associated with Lakewood or have family/friends at Lakewood to attend this event. Please keep in mind that we are an active cemetery, and we ask that you are quiet and respectful of anyone who may be visiting loved ones onsite.

What are my transportation and parking options?

Free parking is available on the sides of all roads inside the cemetery, unless signage indicates restrictions. Metro Transit bus lines 6 and 23 stop directly outside of Lakewood's front gates, at 36th & Hennepin Ave, a walk of ~2 blocks to the Garden Mausoleum. Bicyclists can lock up at a rack near Lakewood's front gates and walk from there.

Do I have to bring my printed ticket to the event?

No, printed tickets are not required. We will have a guest list at the door.

Questions? Call the Lakewood events line at 612-540-5165 or email to events@lakewoodcemetery.org.