John James
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ecotopian.bsky.social
John James
@ecotopian.bsky.social
4.3K followers 6.8K following 180 posts
Poet, scholar, environmental humanist • Author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring, 2022), and Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026) • Following the X-odus.
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ecotopian.bsky.social
I’ve got two new poems out in Image. Here’s a teaser, but you can read both poems in full on the website — or order the print issue!
imagejournal.org/issue-124
April 26, 2025 at 10:37 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
This is why they hate us. Because we make things. Because we resist their structures of power, and do so with intelligence. Because they know, as Shelley says, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

This one's mine, from Winter, Glossolalia (BSPG, 2022).
#smallpoemsunday.
THRUST // The purple-stippled, / brindled cultivars defeat / the heat, wrest moisture / from topsoil desiccated / by the sun's dialectic / with the earth, ripe plums / further ripened, the fogged light / chalked across their skin / gesturing to the red flesh: / the plant supplants a word, world.
March 16, 2025 at 2:30 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
My poem, “The Field Which Had Been a Meadow Once,” is in THE LAST MILKWEED, out now from @tupelopress.bsky.social. The poem takes its title from a poem in @joriegraham.bsky.social’s book TO 2040 (which I highly recommend) and leans into dialogue with Robert Duncan.
#poem #newpoem #poetry
February 7, 2025 at 8:45 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
A poem for #smallpoemsunday. Robert Hass’s “Iowa, January,” one of my favorite small poems in the language.
IOWA, JANUARY In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow. Over and over, he enters the furrow.
January 26, 2025 at 1:36 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Happy MLK Day to all. Power to you.
January 20, 2025 at 5:32 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
DC from the air. (Well, really the VA side of the Potomac.)
January 10, 2025 at 7:56 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
This week! DC! Busboys and Poets, K St location, Sunday, 5 PM.
@busboysandpoets.bsky.social
January 9, 2025 at 12:37 AM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Joseph Brodsky’s “Star of the Nativity,” from his Nativity Poems (FSG, 2001, but originally published much earlier). A holiday post for #smallpoemsunday on this day, the shortest of the year. Happy belated #soltice!
In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain, a child was born in a cave in order to save the world; it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart. To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away— from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.
December 22, 2024 at 11:55 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Another short piece for #smallpoemsunday, this one from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s MUSCADINE (Four Way, 2023).
#poem #poetry #shortpoem
“Coroner in the Kitchen,” from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s Muscadine (Four Way Books, 2023).
December 15, 2024 at 4:41 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land is out now! I had the distinct honor to blurb the book, which is so smart (and hilarious), and I’m reading with Krystal next month in DC to celebrate its release (Busboys & Poets, K St).
#newbook #novel #fiction #hybridgenre #latinxlit
Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land (Texas Review Press, 2024)
December 13, 2024 at 12:50 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Here's the beginning to a long-ish poem, "Pastoral," which appeared in Tupelo Quarterly / @tupelopress.bsky.social. It's the last I'll post by way of introduction to Bluesky, but I've got some new poems coming soon!

Read the full poem here: www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-feat...

#poetry #poem
Pastoral A peach tree in the snow. A black cloud in a peach tree in the snow. I am talking, now, to a consultant from the online tax firm about a form that needs fixing and this flimsy piece of former wood wavers in the hand. In the wind, in the hand. It could have made peaches, or framed a house’s bones. Instead it serves as background for columns of numbers that signify financial decline. A real and imminent catastrophe. It is Greek, catastrophe, meaning “downturn,” and derives primarily from theater. A peach tree in the snow. Paper leaves in a peach tree in the snow. Across the street, some men fell a tree, a rigid pine whose torqued enormity reminds me of the clustered redwoods lining the campus creek or logged to build Victorian structures hulking Telegraph’s curb. They put the wood in a machine that makes wood chips. The smell of burning gas precipitates a real and imminent catastrophe. A peach tree in the snow. Wood chips in a peach tree in the snow. Sheep, deer, wild elk. With their antlers they terrorize the bark. Anthers. The purple flowers throw their seed and other flowers catch it. Spent stamen, little rusted pistol. A bullet lodged in the trunk. My daughter decapitates dandelions, cradles the heads in her hand, watches as the old ones scatter in the real and imminent wind. They float on unimpeded in the hand, in the wind. A peach tree in the snow. Shell casings in a peach tree in the snow. My species is industrious, dapper and intelligent, formed in the lucid substance between the sublime and the belligerent. Ice caps retire and slip into a warming, gorgeous sea. We place granite on our counters, white stones in the garden. We watch the turbines turn. A black cloud in the snow. A peach tree in a black cloud in the snow.
December 11, 2024 at 3:47 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Timothy Donnelly’s “Jonah,” from The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019). #smallpoemsunday #shortpoemsunday #poetry
December 8, 2024 at 4:43 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
The kids are excited for tonight’s festivities, whatever they might be… Merry Krampusnacht!
December 5, 2024 at 10:00 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Not my regular content, but the millennial in me couldn’t resist. 😋
December 1, 2024 at 1:49 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Read Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost this weekend. One of his best.
November 26, 2024 at 6:22 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
One for #shortpoemsunday. A haiku by the great Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass.
November 24, 2024 at 5:15 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
An excerpt from my poem “Circles,” which appeared as part of a folio in Tupelo Quarterly, along with an interview by the great Henk Rossouw.
www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-feat...
November 22, 2024 at 12:44 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Here's the companion poem to "Action in the Infinitive," which I posted earlier today. This one is called "Infinite Gyre of Possible Ends" and also appeared in @hopkinsreview.bsky.social, with thanks again to @doramalech.bsky.social!

(Click image for alt-text.)
to swaddle the rifle, to wipe clean its lip / to sponge dried milk from an infant’s cheek / to dribble the oil, to torch it completely / to scrape the whole whale from the beach / to stack gold plates, illustrate utopia / to soak the sun’s light from the pitch of the roof / to pace time, its sugared circularity / to unfold its mountainous chain / to husk corn, shuck calcium from mollusks / to shear the lichen-eaten willow oak / to garble the language, gum the words / to tattoo the script on a canvas of palm / to cradle the cycle, censure the system / to scoop, from the floor, a loose silverfish / to swirl the garbage, to compost the knife / to temper the rage in the hurricane’s eye / to filter the fire, to breed the abyss / to pluck bottle caps from ribcages of birds
November 21, 2024 at 8:05 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
New poem in @hopkinsreview.bsky.social with thanks to @doramalech.bsky.social!! I’ll post it’s brother this afternoon.
November 21, 2024 at 2:05 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
So basically Door Dash.
November 21, 2024 at 1:08 AM
ecotopian.bsky.social
I was grading some student papers and was reminded how strange and beautiful this poem is. Jean Toomer’s “Beehive,” from Cane (1923).
November 20, 2024 at 9:47 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Here’s one from the new book project, which appeared this summer in Southern Indiana Review.
#poetry #poems #newpoems
November 17, 2024 at 5:36 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
My first collection, The Milk Hours, uses the incessant question inherent in the genre of elegy to explore questions of geography, aesthetics, and ecology. Out from Milkweed: milkweed.org/book/the-mil...
November 16, 2024 at 9:58 PM
ecotopian.bsky.social
There are a lot of good ones out there, but Whitman might take the cake.
November 16, 2024 at 3:38 AM
ecotopian.bsky.social
Here’s a bit from my new book. Full poem at: poets.org/poem/lullaby-3
November 16, 2024 at 3:07 AM