“A poet perpetually at the top of his craft, balancing music and silence to create power.”

“Atsuro Riley does it all: plot, place, people.” 

“In his first collection, a wonder-eyed child tells stories of a place that adult readers understand is laced with darkness. In his second book, adult voices pull back the curtain and show the ugly underbelly of that same place.”

“In both books music is the fabric of being.”

 “Heard-Hoard moans like a blues: like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Riley’s South Carolina lowcountry is surely part reality, part fiction, and one hundred percent truth.”

“Riley’s books present abuse, racism, and displacement, one through the eyes of a child, the other through the eyes of victims and scarred survivors. Perhaps these books pair like innocence and experience, or perhaps they pair like the individual and the collective. Song is the main event.”

EMILY PÉREZ, The Georgia Review