Spring 2008 - University of Georgia Press

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor
Poems by Sean Hill
March
5 1 ⁄2 x 8 1 ⁄2 | 96 pp.
Paper, $16.95t | 978-0-8203-3093-8
A poet’s vision of a southern African American community
from the antebellum era to the present
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.
“Steadily confident, smart, and surprising.”
—Carl Phillips, author of Riding Westward
“Sean Hill has given us a deeply moving fictive exploration—an excavation!—of
the world that shaped him. 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
“Milledgeville, Georgia, exists for most readers through the lens of one
writer, a brilliant and famous white woman who lies in the cemetery’s
high ground, safely above the floodwaters. But lower down lie the
buried citizens of another, less seen community. 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
Also of interest
Leaving Saturn
Poems by Major Jackson
Paper, $16.95t | 978-0-8203-2342-8
The Cave Canem Poetry Prize
A Gathering of Matter / A Matter
of Gathering
Poems by Dawn Lundy Martin
Paper, $16.95t | 978-0-8203-2991-8
The Cave Canem Poetry Prize
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.
Laleh Khadivi
Poetry
www.ugapress.org 800.266.5842