Poet Sean Hill joins Narrative Edge to discuss his collection The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures. In this conversation, Hill reflects on race, memory, fatherhood, and Afrofuturism while exploring how poetry, prose, and speculative storytelling can work together in a single collection. From Georgia history to imagined futures, this episode examines how literature creates space for feeling, reflection, and hope.

The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures Book by Sean Hill

Credit: Milkweed Editions

 

Sean Hill’s latest collection refuses to stay in one lane. The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures blends poetry, prose, documentary style experimentation, and speculative fiction into a layered meditation on race, history, identity, and imagination. In this episode of Narrative Edge, Hill explains how a single line discovered in the archives of Georgia’s former Confederate governor’s mansion stayed with him for years and eventually inspired the title of the book.

The conversation moves fluidly between deeply personal moments and larger cultural questions. Hill shares a moving poem about seeing his son on an ultrasound for the first time, describing the child as “a comma punctuating the whole of my life.” He also reflects on subtle moments of exclusion and invisibility, including an experience aboard an airplane that became the basis for one of the book’s prose pieces. Throughout the discussion, Hill emphasizes poetry’s ability to create emotional resonance rather than simple conclusions.

The episode also explores the collection’s imaginative leap into “Black Stan,” a speculative community in outer space envisioned as both refuge and possibility. Hill describes the concept as hopeful, a way of imagining people learning to live differently with one another and with the worlds around them. Hosts Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya discuss how the collection’s mix of genres creates unexpected connections across the work, giving readers space to draw their own meaning from poems, prose, and imagined futures alike.