Dangerous Goods: Poems - Softcover

Hill, Sean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571314571 ISBN 13: 9781571314574

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2014

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD

From the poet whose stunning debut was praised as “transcendent” by Kevin Young and “steadily confident” by Carl Phillips, Dangerous Goods tracks its speaker throughout North America and abroad, illuminating the ways in which home and place may inhabit one another comfortably or uncomfortably—or both, simultaneously.

From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo to Bemidji, Minnesota, and Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill interweaves the contemporary with the historical, and explores with urgency the relationships among travel, migration, alienation, and home. Here, playful “postcard” poems addressed to Nostalgia and My Third Crush Today sit alongside powerful reflections on the immigration of African Americans to Liberia during and after the era of slavery. Such range and formal innovation make Hill’s second collection both rare and exhilarating. Part shadowbox, part migration map, part travelogue-in-verse, Dangerous Goods is poignant, elegant, and deeply moving.

About this title

About the Author

Sean Hill was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, and received an MFA from the University of Houston. He has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Jerome Foundation, and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. Hill's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House,and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Blues Poems, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. His first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. In 2009 Hill became an editor at Broadsided Press. He lives in Bemidji, MN.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Postcard from a Destination


I’ve heard a man would need a keel
bone six feet long
to cradle muscle enough to pull him
up on his own, keep him in the air,

or wind between a breeze and a gale,
a bit more than enough water
to drown in, and a sense
of displacement to set sail.

A keel bone is not a rudder, but
either can get you here.

I suppose I should say, it was warm
and clear here today, or
boats have keels and birds
have keel bones.

Was I the space between the ruffled
feathers on a robin’s red breast
—a wispy yen for warmth—before
you knew me?

A keel’s leading edge
is called a cutwater,
not to be confused with
a shearwater—a seabird
seldom seen from shore.

This note could fit in a bottle; one’s
being emptied; the last red drop rolls
down its neck.

Soon dregs will rest in the curve
of the wineglass’s belly—a hammock’s
sag here, where the day’s dregs sit on the sea
at the far edge of everything.

Here is me; I am here; I am desire; I
am nothing when you come, I fear.
I'll miss you when you're here. Stay
home; keep me forever.








Dangerous Goods


Praise be unto the alchemical Canadians
for turning HAZARDOUS MATERIALS
into DANGEROUS GOODS; you drove
that day three years ago, and I sat beside you,
thrilled by the sign, by the recognition
in the turning unfamiliar of a phrase. And it
is too easy to think of you, the greatest good
in my life—risking the cliché while I drive
alone this spring across the country. The word
ontology ambushes me as I sit eating alone
at Demitri's Greek Restaurant in Dunkirk,
New York, and the power plant looms outside
on Lake Erie. Gulls wheel in the gloaming
as the lights come on, and carve a pumpkin
with an abstraction is all I can think to do—
the ontology of jack-o-lanterns. I create
a countenance to comfort me in your absence,
but think of candles and their flickering nature—
to be enlightened or to be benighted.
The Prince of Denmark joins you and Jack,
and reminds me of my Fortinbras-father,
a man of action in our hometown. And here
I sit, out in the world, contemplating the being
of jack-o-lanterns, which will haunt me
whenever I'm away again from you.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571314571
• ISBN 13: 9781571314574
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104