Blood Ties & Brown Liquor

by Hill, Sean

• ISBN13: 9780820330938
• ISBN10: 0820330930
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-03-15
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Sean Hill is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

Southampton County, Virginia Aubade 1831	p. 1
Pocketful of Smoke
Milledgeville Aubade 1831	p. 5
Auspice	p. 7
Elegy for an Older Brother 1922	p. 9
Nigger Street 1937	p. 10
Milledgeville Haibun	p. 11
Joe Chappel's Foot Log Bottom Blues 1952	p. 12
A Negro Teacher's Bible 1953	p. 14
Willie's Say 1954	p. 15
Uncle John	p. 17
The State House Aflame 1833	p. 19
Quiet Lore
In Memory Hill Cemetery	p. 23
Uncle Phineas with Polaroid 1959	p. 25
Aunt Flo and Uncle Phineas	p. 27
Lillian and Her Cats	p. 28
Dawn 1991	p. 30
Lessoning	p. 31
Learning to Walk	p. 32
Words like Rivers	p. 33
b. Nov. 14, 1926: Grandmother Poems	p. 37
Blacker Than Tomorrow
Silas Wright at Age Seven 1914	p. 45
Hands 1921	p. 46
Silas and Mulberries 1917	p. 49
Hagridden 1915	p. 51
A Wright Family Tree	p. 52
Shiloh Baptist Church Cemetery 1923	p. 54
Devorah's Aubade 1938	p. 55
Insurance Man 1946	p. 57
Nightmare 1946	p. 58
Lineaments through the Line of Seasons	p. 59
Candlefly	p. 60
Harrowing	p. 61
Candlefly Redux	p. 62
What You Want to Know
I was born	p. 65
Haints 1918	p. 67
A Draft 1927	p. 69
Silas Fishing 1967	p. 71
Silas Speaks of Dirt Daubers 1973	p. 72
Milledgeville Evening Song	p. 73
Just as Sure	p. 75
Boy	p. 76
I was born ... Redux	p. 77
Notes	p. 81
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