Dangerous Good By American Hill Analysis

Sean Hill’s poetry collection, Dangerous Goods, is a unique narrative that captures the emotions and experiences of his adventures in the United States and in Africa. Hill uses many different structures and themes to clearly illustrate his experiences to the reader. One thing that caught my attention was Hill makes an interesting parallel between his experiences in Liberia and in the South. One poem that I feel that captures this parallelism is A Freeman Speaks of His Fellow, or Prom Milledgeville to New Philadelphia, 1872. My interpretation of the poem was that there are different types of freedom. America is known for being “Land of the Free” yet, blacks were enslaved. Sandy Gannoway seems that he feels that his freedom in America is more than satisfying than freedom in Liberia. There were very interesting line breaks that I felt that Hill choose to reinforce the idea of being free. For example, “—now he going off to Liberia, Land / of the free?” (l.5-6) and “Sandy Gannoway gone away from here / leaving this freedom to us new freedom” (l.11-12). It took me a few times to read this poem and I am not sure if this was Hill’s intention but Gannoway sounds very similar to going

In My Father’s House, Hill reflects on his perception of the world as a child versus an adult. The world around us during childhood is much vast and interesting. A perfect example of this in the first stanza. When Hill was a child, the Reverend Freeman seemed like a giant. When we reflect on those same things as adults, they tend to become average or smaller. Hill makes this emphasis when he says that Reverend Freeman was “7ft tall when I was 4” (l.2). I am just assuming, but I think that Hill would not describe Reverend Freeman as seven foot tall. Unlike most of Hill’s poems, I didn’t find the lineation to be out of the ordinary; no special line breaks to emphasis the