Atsuro Riley is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and winner of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a finalist for PEN America’s Voelcker Poetry Award, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2021, and a Bookworm Top 10 Book of the Year. His 2010 book Romey’s Order was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. Riley’s work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine. Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Atsuro Riley lives in San Francisco.
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Romey's OrderFrom"Chord"
Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,
the boy river-brinked and chorded.
Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.
Sieved our alluvial sounds—
Romey's Order: -
Romey's OrderFrom"O"
Always the story-man lights lard-lamps in a circle and tells.
A boy scrapes and ever-graves for likeness with a stick.
Two girls croodle corn-songs cane-songs back and forth unbroken.
Once-bent bodies leap (in chorus) leg and whirl.
Romey's Order: -
Romey's OrderFrom"Fosterling-Song"
Hadn’t he come to us out from County Home
cleaved to a caul-swaddle
cloth (of coarse croker-sack weave)
he all the time plucked and wrung?
Romey's Order:
“One of the most exciting and distinctive debut collections in years . . . the relation of language to the actual experience of perception is 100 percent pitch-perfect here.” —The Believer [on Romey’s Order]
“Originality is easier said than done. Most works of art, like most consumer goods, are versions or outright imitations. In contemporary poetry, even the so-called experimental often seems derivative and weighted with conventions. But when a new book of poems is as different from precedents as Atsuro Riley's Romey's Order, readers should take special notice.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
