Romey’s Order
WHITING WRITERS’ AWARD
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