Blood Ties & Brown Liquor: Poems
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.

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Blood Ties & Brown Liquor: Poems
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.

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Blood Ties & Brown Liquor: Poems

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor: Poems

by Sean Hill
Blood Ties & Brown Liquor: Poems

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor: Poems

by Sean Hill

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780820330938
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication date: 03/15/2008
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 96
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.24(d)

About the Author

SEAN HILL is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 2003 and was awarded a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in 2006. Hill's poems have been published widely in journals, including Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares.

SEAN HILL is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 2003 and was awarded a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in 2006. Hill's poems have been published widely in journals, including Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Southampton County, Virginia Aubade 1831 1

Pocketful of Smoke
Milledgeville Aubade 1831 5
Auspice 7
Elegy for an Older Brother 1922 9
Nigger Street 1937 10
Milledgeville Haibun 11
Joe Chappel’s Foot Log Bottom Blues 1952 12
A Negro Teacher’s Bible 1953 14
Willie’s Say 1954 15
Uncle John 17
The State House Aflame 1833 19

Quiet Lore
In Memory Hill Cemetery 23
Uncle Phineas with Polaroid 1959 25
Aunt Flo and Uncle Phineas 27
Lillian and Her Cats 28
Dawn 1991 30
Lessoning 31
Learning to Walk 32
Words like Rivers 33
b. Nov. 14, 1926: Grandmother Poems 37

Blacker Than Tomorrow
Silas Wright at Age Seven 1914 45
Hands 1921 46
Silas and Mulberries 1917 49
Hagridden 1915 51
A Wright Family Tree 52
Shiloh Baptist Church Cemetery 1923 54
Devorah’s Aubade 1938 55
Insurance Man 1946 57
Nightmare 1946 58
Lineaments through the Line of Seasons 59
Candlefly 60
Harrowing 61
Candlefly Redux 62

What You Want to Know
I was born . . . 65
Haints 1918 67
A Draft 1927 69
Silas Fishing 1967 71
Silas Speaks of Dirt Daubers 1973 72
Milledgeville Evening Song 73
Just as Sure 75
Boy 76
I was born . . . Redux 77

Notes 81

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