Sean Hill - Reviews

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

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, 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