Sean Hill - Böcker

Sean Hill's debut collection, imaginative in the characters it invents and in the formal literary traditions it juxtaposes, is nevertheless firmly rooted in Hill's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, which he transforms into a poetic landscape that can accommodate the scope of his vision of collective and personal history. The poems create a call and response across six generations of family of the fictional Silas Wright, a black man born in 1907. As Hill takes on the voices and experiences of diverse characters in or connected to the Wright family, these individual glimpses add up to an intimate portrait of Milledgeville's black community across two centuries as it responds to stirring events both public and private.From a slave woman's scratchy hay-stuffed mattress to a black insurance agent's sinister patter, from sweet honey to the searing heat of brickyard kilns, the poems make vivid the sensuous details of quotidian lives punctuated by love and violence. From pantoum to haiku, from high-toned lyricism to low-down blues, Hill uses language in all its many incarnations to speak deeply about both southern identity and African American community.

A magnificent poetry collection to follow-up the debut Kevin Young compared to the those of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop's. From the poet whose stunning debut was praised as "transcendent" by Kevin Young and "steadily confident" by Carl Phillips, Dangerous Goods tracks its speaker throughout North America and abroad, illuminating the ways in which home and place may inhabit one another comfortably or uncomfortably -- or both simultaneously. From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Bemidji, Minnesota, and Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill interweaves the contemporary with the historical, and explores with urgency the relationship between travel, migration, alienation, and home. Here, playful "postcard" poems addressed to Nostalgia and My Third Crush Today sit alongside powerful reflections on the immigration of African Americans to Liberia during and after the era of slavery. Such range and formal innovation make Hill's second collection both rare and exhilarating. Part shadowbox, part migration map, part travelogue-in-verse, Dangerous Goods is poignant, elegant, and deeply moving.

An extraordinary new work, epic in scale and lyrical in flight, by the award-winning author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. “How big is a home?” “What is space without reaching?” “You ever think about being remembered?”Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.” This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart. Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.