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"Blood Ties & Brown Liquor" by Sean Hill (University of Georgia Press, $16.95)

In his debut collection, "Blood Ties & Brown Liquor," award-winning poet Sean Hill honors and explores the historic cultural landscape of his hometown of Milledgeville. Hill sets his poems amid the beauty of the former state capital's crape myrtles and mockingbirds while simultaneously confronting the legacy of enslavement inherited by Mill- edgeville's black community. "Blood Ties & Brown Liquor" is an innovative collection of bluesy, meditative poems that is certain to mark Hill's emergence as a major new voice in American poetry.

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One element that distinguishes Hill's collection, aside from his strong use of place, is the structural framework of the book. Hill has constructed his entire text around the lives of a fictional African-American family, aptly and ironically named the Wrights. The text follows six generations of Wrights through enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation and desegregation. As each family member contends with his or her own sense of identity, each also struggles to understand what it means, as one of the characters, Silas Wright, puts it, to be "born to my skin."

New readers of poetry will appreciate Hill's accessible language and use of vernacular. Those more familiar with poetic form will be impressed by Hill's dexterous handling of the villanelle, haibun and aubade. The collection includes several aubades —- a poem about lovers parting at daybreak —- and as Hill's lovers say goodbye each morning, within the context of enslavement or segregation, their parting takes on a much deeper emotional resonance.

Hill cannot write about Milledgeville without summoning the ghost of its most famous literary resident, Flannery O'Connor. The second section of the collection begins with a visit to O'Connor's graveside in the poem "In Memory Hill Cemetery." The speaker of the poem takes a Polaroid of O'Connor's headstone and then wanders over to the black section of the cemetery, noting, "No headstones here,/only three rusted links hung/from a rod, the first for birth,/the second for life, and the third for death in slavery —-". "Blood Ties & Brown Liquor" succeeds in commemorating those unnamed and unheralded lives.