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“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.
“In The Negroes Send Their Love, Sean Hill holds the weight of history up to the light of memory, tracing the lines of family, community, and identity through heartbreaking poetry. These poems are born from the soil of the South, the chill of Alaska, the warmth of Montana, and the endless expanse of Black imagination. There are letters to Hill’s ancestors, conversations with his son, and meditations on what it means to be a Negro even in the twenty-first century.”—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
“The Negroes Send Their Love is brilliant and immersive. A rich honoring of place, lineage, and history also interwoven with the cares and concerns of fatherhood, of loss, and of love in the future. I am thankful for all these poems carry—and all that they demand we carry alongside them.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
“Bold, brilliant, and defying restriction, The Negroes Send Their Love is a remarkable new offering from Sean Hill. This book recognizes the past as the future’s foundation. Tradition and innovation combine in the hybrid chorus of poems, essays, and stories that sing on these pages. Filled as it is with wide-ranging, visionary love, Hill’s book is unflinchingly committed to casting clear light on the lives he centers.”—Camille T. Dungy, author of America, A Love Story
"Lyrical, profound, and utterly essential, The Negroes Send Their Love is a powerful message sent across the void, demanding we listen, remember, and imagine what worlds we might yet build. Read it and be transformed.”—Sheree Renée Thomas, author of Dark Matter