By Wesley Rothman, PhD

The poet, Sean Hill, is a son of Milledgeville, Georgia, a professor, an editor and publisher, a historian, a birder, a traveler, a mentor, a friend, a partner, a parent. He is more than these too. And his growing body of poetic work has always studied and imagined the past, the people who came before and how they, how the past, inhabits the present. The epigraph to his first book, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, rooted in Milledgeville, was borrowed from James Baldwin: “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.” What Hill navigates in Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, and in his second book, Dangerous Goods, a roaming of geography and history, as well as in his 2026 release, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, is what Baldwin describes elsewhere:

Sean Hill’s poetry gathers a rich depth of historical information, a wide array of personal urgencies, with a fiercely inquiring mind, and filters them through sharp poetic structures, visceral narratives, and as his oeuvre grows, it filters them through a broadening range of written shapes. This trajectory is regularly expanding what a “Sean Hill poem” might be (what a poem can be), “re-creating” not only oneself “according to a principle more humane and more liberating,” but demonstrating how we might collectively re-create ourselves in mind, in language, in relation to one another. Hill is mapping how he and we might re-create, revise, redux the “unitedness” this Republic purports, how we might navigate this unutterably and unavoidable human challenge to rob history of its ongoing tyrannical power, how we might change history—the present and the ever-growing past, and therefore, our future. So Hill’s poems work through history in Baldwin’s all-encompassing sense.

In light of his second book, Dangerous Goods, Hill wrote,

Dangerous Goods widens the growing spiral, geographically and historically, from Milledgeville to Houston, Bemidji to the Bahamas, Liberia to Philadelphia, 1619 to the 21^st century, “postcard” poems to series to a story. Hill’s newest work, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, widens the spiral further: “reduxes,” poem-essays, recipe poems, bird poems, a photo essay [in words], dialogues, and pronunciations; 1857 to 2338. The title also sparks several immediate questions: From where? To whom? And a response that is both question and affirmation: They/We do? They/We do. The title suggests some answers as well: From the future, and elsewhere. From here and now. Perhaps from the past. Genuinely sent from the future to the ancestors of now. Perhaps genuinely, though also smartly to the people and social systems that have hurt them, having traveled with and to some extent beyond the heft of American racist oppression. To send one’s love is to be gone, apart, free even.

Ever-generous, Hill immediately establishes “perspective” as a driving notion for the book and then shortly offers this frankness in “Where I Live,” guiding our attention to perspective: “You know, sometimes I remember the ‘I’ always lives in a context—spatial and temporal. I think that is a generous place to start.” This prose-poem-set-of-meditations anaphorizes “You know” at the start of each segment, colloquial and instructive, the third of which highlights what I hoped would come to us:

Just as Baldwin’s “history” is capacious and generous, when he famously embarrassed William F. Buckley in a 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union, he also lifted every voice of this capacious, generous “I:”

Hill gathers perspectives—in spaces and times, articles that indicate individuality and collectivity, and features of identity that are pinged by one’s spaces and times. Perusing even just the table of contents makes this gathering clear. A sequence of poems that is spread across the book, though concentrated in the latter portion, builds with Hughes’s blocks: “A Negro Cook’s Recipe for Home in the Slaveholding South,” “A Negro Speaks of Worlds,” “A Negro Speaks on Community Relations in the Twenty-Third Century” (somewhere a gentle nod to Nina Simone’s avant-garde, imaginative “22nd Century”), and “A Negro Speaks of Lewis Temple in 2293.” This sequence woven with but also largely preceded by another strand: “A Father and Son Speak About Combustion,” “A Father and Son Speak About the Painting A Desperate Stand by Charles M. Russell” (also echoing Baldwin’s correlation between “it comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you;” and I can’t shake the subtle associations with the infamous Southern Agrarians I’ll Take My Stand: The South and The Agrarian Tradition (1930), or our so recent, deadly-intended “Stand-Your-Ground” laws), “A Father and Son Speak About Perspective,” “A Father and Son Speak About Distinctions,” “A Father Speaks to His Son About Reckless Behavior.”

Perspective is the keystone, the many perspectives and the individual—honest and reflective. Hill layers the dimensions of a person who is Black, a person who moves about the United States (and the world), a person who is a father (inherently involving gendered experiences and notions), with several other very clear dimensions. We, somewhat recently, have gained the term “intersectionality” to help us understand how these (and many other) components, these whole layers of ourselves interact, combine, move through, and are moved by the world(s) around us. Not only does The Negroes Send Their Love gather these incisive, individual, and communal announcements; gather dialogues among father and son, across generations; gather a loving caution: “We need soon to lay low our goliaths / to honor the fact that all we have are the breaths / of our lives— / defy what collides with the sacred.”⁵ Not only is this an expansive, time-traveling, poetic form-traveling-and-innovating journey, it is an invitation into the excavation, the observation, the realization of how the world makes us and how we continually make the world. This has always been Hill’s work. We see Hill further enacting here what he described about his poetic mindset when Dangerous Goods came out, “Displacement keeps me from sinking, allows me a vantage from which to witness and write. Fascination—to be held as if spellbound—is an act of displacement, an irresistible narrowing of attentiveness displacing broad attention” (“What Spills Over”). Not only do the notions and written shapes of this new book buoy Hill, they reveal how true revision re-creates us and keeps us afloat. 

Hill makes explicit throughout his latest intricate and layered work, and through his larger body of work, foundational components of his perspective, which inevitably, and beautifully, lead him to revisit, to re-evaluate, to redux, to revise as he moves through different spaces, times, both physically and imaginatively. His poetic reduxing also brings to mind some of Kiese Laymon’s recent notions about revision:

The Negroes Send Their Love on its own, and in relation with the rest of Hill’s body of work, is an effort to witness and testify to the precarity yet inevitability of “going on.” We must go into the future working to better know our history, ourselves, our complexities and shortcomings, our effects. Just as Laymon notes, Hill makes clear that this has long been a deep current for Black Americans, for the African Diaspora. It’s why The Negroes Send Their Love into and from the future in this book. 

And since Hill is an impeccable historian, moving fluidly between present and past, future and its past, the past’s implications into its future, I must stress one final layer of Hill’s reduxing. His work’s consistent sliding along the timeline brings him, in his ways, clearly into dialogue with many key poets of recent decades, and at least a few major figures of the 20^th century. 

In his foreword to Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (A New Version), substantially revised and published (1979) twenty-six years after the original version (1953), Robert Penn Warren notes, 

Brother to Dragons serves as a long-term “redux” of Warren’s, and Natasha Trethewey quoted to this excerpt in her closing address as Poet Laureate, ultimately published as “The Quarrel With Ourselves: Robert Penn Warren’s ‘World of Action and Liability.’” For Trethewey (and Warren and Hill), “the role of poetry [as] reckoning with our history and imagining our future, for poetry is concerned not only with the past. It presents a way to look backward and forward at once, showing a world that is possible, what we can work toward.”⁸ This is what Hill accomplishes, especially with The Negroes Send Their Love. 

We must contend not only with history (as Baldwin said, “one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating”), but with others’ and our own situatedness in order to access history from different perspectives. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that Trethewey and poet Jake Adam York “enact and advocate for a profound revising of our senses of history in order to gain a fuller, more accurate, more nuanced understanding of how American society has developed. Central to this revising is an attention to the history of conscious and unconscious ideas, assumptions, actions, and policies that comprise racism in America.”⁹ Hill’s work includes but goes beyond even this scope to be always revisiting and refining and re-creating what makes us who we are (remember the Baldwin epigraph for Hill’s first book), what molds and mars and mends us. In an interview with Rowan Lynum, Trethewey described her poetic work as an effort to create monuments for the people and history that is often forgotten, erased, or twisted, and she mentioned, 

And Hill takes this a step further, reminding us that our history is shared, that it is present in all that we do, and that we must be consistently re-membering, re-looking, re-creating what the world is and who we think we are.

Hill’s closing and eponymous poem, “The Negroes Send Their Love” is incantatory and incomplete, as is Hill’s work, as is the future. In it, the Negroes mend, rend, rescind, lend, penned, tend, defend, wend, contend, end, spend. The Negroes verb. The Negroes enact their love, react to others’ love or lack thereof, interact with others’ shove. 

And, “The Negroes in their love : their rage, their sorrow, their nostalgia, their joy, and.” Apart from the epilogue, this is one of the book’s final statements and it shifts from the title phrasing (“The Negroes”) to “We Negroes send our love,” achieving at least three impacts: 

This shift in the closing poem is indicative of Hill’s ongoing project. This is a revision of phrasing which is born from a revision of thinking and naming. It is a sign of the speaker and the poet changing and is a signal for how the reader might change. The poem and the book point us toward better understanding the weight of ourselves as expansive individuals tethered to others and a part of many larger wholes. We contribute to and are dependent on community of many sorts. 

As noted earlier, Hill once described “home” as something from which he has displaced himself, while also writing about how displacement (e.g. water displacement) is something that keeps him afloat, moving, reviewing, and revising. Displacement is a useful tool for revising oneself, and for Hill as a revisory tool with which to fashion poems. He wrote: “Home is an emotion one wakes up to one morning. Home is the feeling you meet as you drive into town for the second time. Home is the tug you feel looking out the plane window as you fly away for the first time. Home is the sound the ground makes under your feet with every step.”¹¹ Home takes many forms and reveals itself to us in new ways all the time, if we choose to notice. While home is a slippery notion, Hill seems to propose that perspective, our revisioning of ourselves, our commitment to seeing others and our ties to them is how our “home” grows throughout our lives. Hill’s body of work, then, serves as a time machine into which he and we climb. We witness who and what made the world before us, and so made us. We witness ourselves and study our perspectives. We whir into the future to look back at ourselves, to imagine, to repair, to restore, to revise, and keep on revising.

1. Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt” 47. ↩︎
2. Hill, “What Spills Over.” ↩︎
3. Hill, The Negroes Send Their Love 21. ↩︎
4. Baldwin, “James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley.” ↩︎
5. Hill, The Negroes Send Their Love, “A Father Speaks to His Son About Reckless Behavior” 175. ↩︎
6. Laymon 192. ↩︎
7. Warren. ↩︎
8. Tretheway. ↩︎
9. Rothman 193. ↩︎
10. Lynum. ↩︎
11. Hill, “What Spills Over.” ↩︎

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Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley.” The Cambridge Union Society Debate. 18 February 1965. https://youtu.be/5Tek9h3a5wQ?si=zXOOCWrdI89pzEvs. Accessed 16 December 2025.

—. “The White Man’s Guilt.” Ebony. August 1965. 47.

Baldwin, James and Nikki Giovanni. A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1973.

Hill, Sean. “What Spills Over and What Urges the Spill: Some Why and Wherefores of Dangerous Goods”. Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics. Issue 50. February 2015. Accessed 16 December 2025.

—. Blood Ties and Brown Liquor: Poems. University of Georgia Press. 2008.

—. Dangerous Goods: Poems. Milkweed Editions. 2013.

—. The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures. Milkweed Editions. 2026.

Laymon, Kiese. “What We Owe and Are Owed.” Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation In a Time of Pandemic. Ed. Valerie Boyd. Lookout Books. 2022.

Lynam, Rowan. “Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Palette Poetry. 21 August 2018. Accessed 15 January 2026.

Rothman, Wesley. American Racial Poetics Through Baraka’s Blues: Some Case Studies 1928-2022. Dissertation. The Catholic University of America. 2023.

Trethewey, Natasha. “The Quarrel with Ourselves: Robert Penn Warren’s ‘World of Action and Liability.” Writer’s Chronicle. March/April 2015.

Warren, Robert Penn. “Foreword.” Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices: A New Version. Random House. 1979. Accessed 15 January 2026.

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Wesley Rothman is the author of SUBWOOFER (New Issues 2017), winner of the New Issues Editor’s Choice Award & an honorable mention for the 2018 Motton Book Prize. His work has appeared in The Believer, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Cherry Tree, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Hopkins Review, Image Journal, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Slowdown, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, Waxwing, the Poets on Growth anthology, The Golden Shovel Anthology, & elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Boston Review, Callaloo, Rain Taxi Review of Books, & American Microreviews & Interviews. He has earned degrees from the University of San Diego, Emerson College, & Catholic University, and he’s served in organizing or editorial roles for Copper Canyon Press, Ploughshares, Salamander, and Mass Poetry. For over a decade, he has taught in higher education and high school summer programs, including for Berklee College of Music, Emerson College, Suffolk University, UMass Boston, Catholic University, Loyola University Chicago, and Upward Bound. His work has earned fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. A former Teaching Artist for the National Gallery of Art, Rothman teaches at Howard University.