Published by the University of Georgia Press, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor is Sean Hill’s debut collection of poems.
The book is firmly rooted in Hill’s hometown of Milledgeville, which is transformed into a poetic landscape defined by the scope of his vision and 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.
“Sean Hill’s songs are narrative to his town. Formally various, richly textured, they voice unwritten history with an acute sense of the deep sound of a place,” said Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire.
Currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Hill will be at UGA April 3 for the “Black Poets Lean South” poetry symposium.
