Blood Ties & Brown Liquor

Each poem in Hill's debut collection, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, builds on the poetic landscape created from his hometown, Milledgeville, Georgia, offering a portrait of the town's black community. A multitude of voices rises from the pages to celebrate familial love, memory, and yearning, and to confront racism.

The poems create a call and response across six generations of the family of the fictional character Silas Wright, a black man born in 1907. From a slave woman's scratchy hay-stuffed mattress to a black insurance agent's ominous patter, from sweet honey to the searing heat of brickyard kilns, these poems spread before us a sensuous world of quotidian lives punctuated by love and violence.

Although the white community appears in newspaper snippets and schoolyard taunts, it is relegated to the margins, while the black community's private concerns and shared memories occupy the book's center. This reverse marginalization is a source of creative tension, as is Hill's juxtaposition of formal and free verse, historical and fictional narratives, and poetic lyricism and colloquial diction. A variety of poetic forms share space with the blues and dramatic monologues unspooling down the page in associative leaps.

Reading these poems is like exploring a hall of mirrors in which recurring images, echoing voices, and familiar places reflect and refract one another's light to illuminate our contemporary notions of Southern identity, African-American community and family, and personal and societal interpretations of history.

About the cover art: It's a detail from a watercolor painted by the artist Frank Stanley Herring during the 1930s or 1940s. It depicts Milledgeville’s Black business district, McIntosh Street, during that era.

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