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by Sean Hill (Author)
An extraordinary new work, epic in scale and lyrical in flight, by the award-winning author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.
"How big is a home?"
"What is space without reaching?"
"You ever think about being remembered?"
Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill's new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity's seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as "arboreal miners" with "a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns" that the speaker observes and "can't help but see blood."
This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart.
Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.
Author Biography
Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read by the Georgia Center for the Book. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems and essays have appeared in Harvard Review, Orion, Oxford American, Tin House and in nearly three dozen anthologies. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. He is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press and has taught at several universities. Hill lives with his family in southwest Montana and is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.
