Dangerous Goods

Sean Hill was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, and received an MFA from the University of Houston. He has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Jerome Foundation, and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. Hill's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House,and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Blues Poems, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. His first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. In 2009 Hill became an editor at Broadsided Press. He lives in Bemidji, MN.

"There's a satisfaction in the thought of Hill's poems, but also a balance with the real and practical, the feelings that lead anyone to puzzle out their relationships and interactions with colleagues, strangers. Hill shows us the emotions that come from thinking." --The Rumpus Advance Praise for Dangerous Goods "Measuring the 'distance between desires' and the fear and possibilities of displacement, Sean Hill's brilliant new book will make your heart skip 'like those flat stones that kiss the skin / of the pond and fly off again.' Where Hill's first book was an evocation of his Georgia homeplace, Dangerous Goods travels widely and well, from nineteenth-century Liberia to present day Minnesota, from 'Blacks on Boats' to postcards written to nostalgia and regret. Channeling Richard Hugo and Jay Wright, Hill's poignant, pointed poetry is a divining rod, knowing well that the dark is 'an ocean for us all.'" --Kevin Young "Sean Hill is a fastidious thinker. His poetry takes the facts and figures of history and weaves all of us into its fabric. His imagination soars like a long-winged ancient bird. We ride on his back on every page looking out over the territory of his mind, a tenacious wise flight, worth the wind." --Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner Praise for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor "Steadily confident, smart, and surprising." --Carl Phillips "Deeply moving." --Edward Hirsch "Formally various, richly textured." --Mark Doty "[A] transcendent debut." --Kevin Young "Hill's book gave me more hope for American poetry than any other book I read last year." --Jason Koo "A major new voice in American poetry." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution