Monday, November 17, 2008


Sean Hill was in Kansas City over the weekend to give a reading promoting his first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. After hearing him read and spending some time talking with him, I'm really excited to read the book, which is a series of poems excavating the Wright family lineage and post-Civil War race relations in his hometown, Milledgeville, GA (incidentally, Flannery O'Connor's hometown). Good friend Wayne Miller, friends with Sean since their MFA days in Houston, had recommended the book back in February. But I had a giant stack of new poetry books to work through and couldn't afford to order the six he recommended.

But the reading went so well! Filling the auditorium at the Plaza Library, I was proud of Kansas City. Sean read his gorgeous poems, more than several of them written in form, traditional and invented. He read one, a new one, called "Penumbra" whose ending had the most seamless associative shifts from image to image that I've come across in months. Here's the first two sections of "Words like Rivers", from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor:


Words Like Rivers

1.

At bars we banter over brown liquor,
Irish Scotch Canadian—
none of these my people.

Whiskeys, brown with undertones—
reds and yellows—
arranged behind bars.

All I want is a swallow,
but I just broke this bottle.
Lord all I need’s a swallow,
but I done broke my bottle.
Broken bottle blues—wallowing
in them broken bottle blues.


2.

Black men bibulous—
bilious like me belching
the morning after whiskey—

stream words like rivers
and families riven over
centuries.

My old lady’s yellow
and round like the moon.
I say my lady’s full
and yellow like the moon.
And Lord I can’t afford her
and that baby due in June.


He, Wayne, Jeanne (Wayne's totally awesome gf) and I had drinks at Wayne & Jeanne's after the reading. Sean's company proved solid as his poems.

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