Dangerous Goods

“Measuring the ‘distance between desires’ and the fear and possibilities of displacement, Sean Hill’s brilliant new book will make your heart skip ‘like those flat stones that kiss the skin / of the pond and fly off again.’ Where Hill’s first book was an evocation of his Georgia homeplace, Dangerous Goods travels widely and well, from nineteenth-century Liberia to present day Minnesota, from ‘Blacks on Boats’ to postcards written to nostalgia and regret. Channeling Richard Hugo and Jay Wright, Hill’s poignant, pointed poetry is a divining rod, knowing well that the dark is ‘an ocean for us all.’”

“Sean Hill is a fastidious thinker. His poetry takes the facts and figures of history and weaves all of us into its fabric. His imagination soars like a long-winged ancient bird. We ride on his back on every page looking out over the territory of his mind, a tenacious wise flight, worth the wind.”

“Dangerous Goods is a warning sign posted on vehicles of transport, and the varieties of transport contemplated in this large-hearted book encompass a world of dangers. What tempers the darkness in these marvelous poems is an equally capacious construction of ‘goods’: the ties of love and longing, the elegant modulations of season and place, above all the flexible cadences and recuperations of poetry. Sean Hill has written a book to be grateful for.”