Reviews

Advance Praise for Dangerous Goods

 

“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, author of Head Off & Split

 

“‘Dangerous Goods’ is a warning sign posted on vehicles of transport, and the varieties of transport contemplated in this large-hearted book encompass a world of dangers. Imported flora and fauna assume the status of invasive species; transatlantic crossings poison the lives of a people enslaved and poison the souls of those who enslave them. What tempers the darkness in these marvelous poems is an equally capacious construction of ‘goods’: the ties of love and longing, the elegant modulations of season and place, above all the flexible cadences and recuperations of poetry. Sean Hill has written a book to be grateful for.”

—Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvage

 

“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, author of Book of Hours

 

“Hill’s new collection represents the full range of exilic engagement, the omnivorous curiosity of a restless traveler with no set home to return to this side of memory. The speakers in these poems roam vast spaces, ‘everything excised’ but the past.”

—G. C. Waldrep, author of Archicembalo

 

 

Reviews of Dangerous Goods

“A book of poetry by one of Alaska’s most unsung literary heroes, the book is not out until 2014, but an advance copy secures Hill’s place as a major talent in American poetry.”

—Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of Hyperboreal, in the Juneau Empire

Rebecca Hazelwood wrote a post on “Spring 1986,” one of the poems from Dangerous Goods, on her blog Structure and Style.

Wesley Rothman wrote a review of Dangerous Goods for The Rumpus.

more to come

 

Advance Praise for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor

“Steadily confident, smart, and surprising.”

—Carl Phillips, author of Riding Westward

 

“A deeply moving fictive exploration—an excavation!—of the world that shaped Sean Hill. Silas Wright is his personal entryway to the historical past, and these fully realized lyrics are the forms of his poetic truth.”

—Edward Hirsch, author of Poet’s Choice

 

“Sean Hill’s songs are native to his town. Formally various, richly textured, they voice unwritten history with an acute sense of the deep sound of a place, the stream of blood and talk that courses through this writer’s living hands.”

—Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New & Selected Poems

 

“Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop: these are among the select few whose first books signaled a new vision of form and vernacular, an everyday elegance. We can now add Sean Hill’s transcendent debut to that remarkable list. Blood Ties & Brown Liquor is the real thing—a book to believe in.”

—Kevin Young, author of For the Confederate Dead

 

Reviews of Blood Ties & Brown Liquor

Hill’s book gave me more hope for American poetry than any other book I read last year.
—Jason Koo, author of Man on Extremely Small Island, in The Missouri Review

 

To use the poet’s words, these poems are snapshots “for portraiture and preservation.”…This ability to preserve while projecting is a valuable function of poetry. It makes Blood Ties & Brown Liquor an important book, one of lasting significance.
—Bruce Alford, Alabama Writers’ Forum

 

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor is an innovative collection of bluesy, meditative poems that is certain to mark Hill’s emergence as a major new voice in American poetry.
—Amber Dermont, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

Sean Hill’s poetry debut marks the introduction of an authentic Southern voice that speaks for the African-American community and all native Southerners. Don’t be surprised if this Georgia-born poet’s eye for detail, his memorable imagery, and his talent for telling stories from the past earn him a place among the best poets of our time.
—Donny Seagraves, Athens Magazine

 

It is as if the reader has been sent a postcard, not just from Milledgeville, Georgia, but from another century and the poems are what is scribbled down (in the neatest handwriting) on the back, written by the relative with a knack for writing and storytelling.
—Missy McEwen, Immunization Against Invisibility

more to come