Atsuro Riley Selected Works

At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, a soundscape, and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley gives us a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.

Romey's Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records—and tries to order—the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "blood-home" and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "every burn-mark and blemish," to "bind our river-wrack and leavings," Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with story-telling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind.