Romey’s Order
GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP
WHITING WRITERS’ AWARD
ARTS AND LETTERS AWARD IN LITERATURE, the AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
KATE TUFTS DISCOVERY AWARD
THE BELIEVER POETRY AWARD
THE WITTER BYNNER AWARD from THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
LANNAN LITERARY FELLOWSHIP
FLAVORWIRE: TOP 50 POETRY BOOKS OF THE DECADE
WOOD PRIZE from POETRY magazine
Romey’s Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented speaker 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.
Published U.S. and UK — 2010