The Milk Hours

Some of these poems appeared in Chthonic, a chapbook published by CutBank Books in 2015

Frederick Smock, my first mentor, showed me how to write with clarity and specificity, and with an eye for the natural world. No one deserves more thanks than him.

Thanks to everyone at Milkweed for making it real: to Daniel Slager, Joey McGarvey, Abby Travis, Jordan Bascom, and the entire team. You are magic.

THE ALAN B. SLIFKA FOUNDATION
Designed to honor the legacy of one of the most original poets to debut in recent years—and to reward outstanding poets for years to come—the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize awards $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions to the author of a debut collection of poems. The 2018 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize was judged by Henri Cole.

This book wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of Ariella Ritvo-Slifka and the Alan B. Slifka Foundation.

where he is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

The title of “Klee’s Painting” refers to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. The first instance of italics, in section one, comes from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Those in section two are excerpted, and slightly altered, from Walt Whitman’s essay “A Backward Glace O’er Travel’d Roads.” The italicized lines in section

three are excerpted variously from the Whitman essay and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.”

“Erosion” echoes a line from Brandon Kreitler’s “Valley as a Negative.” The poem is for Carrie Burr, who knows these bees too well.
The italicized text in section three of “Forget the Song” is excerpted and shaped from W. S. Merwin’s “The Birds on the Morning of Going,” which appears in The Carrier of Ladders.
Figs. 1-3 were collaged from images sourced on the British Library’s Flickr Commons page. Many thanks to the curators for making this resource available for public disruption.

Phantom: “Sonata”
Poetry Northwest: “Poem for the Nation, 2016”
Portland Review: “After Guatemala”
Quarterly West: “Fig. 2” and “Fig. 3” (as “Roots | Tumble” and “Colonialisme,” respectively)
Redivider: “Clock Elegy”
Tinderbox Poetry Journal: “Erosion”
Tupelo Quarterly: “April, Andromeda”
Vinyl: “Heirloom (Wreck)”
West Branch: “Klee’s Painting”
Western Humanities Review: “Cata