"Romey's Order" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-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.
About the Author
Atsuro Riley was brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry. His work has appeared in "Poetry", "The Threepenny Review", and "The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets". He has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the Wood Prize from "Poetry" magazine.
Reviews
"The best literature forces you out of your old eyes and that's what happens here. Atsuro Riley's 'Romey's Order' is deep craft – brilliant and consuming and thoroughly strange. When you put this book down, American poetry will be different than when you picked it up" – Kay Ryan, United States Poet Laureate, 2008-2010
"'Romey's Order' is the world of a young boy growing up in backwoods South Carolina. His father is an ex-soldier, his mother the Japanese wife the father brought home from his time as a soldier. Thus the radical dichotomies in the young boy's world, rendered in a dense and beautiful, intensely expressive and inventive language. This language is indebted to Hopkins as well as Heaney, full of a child's invented word-play trying to capture the smells and textures and country-speech he is constantly assaulted by. The boy is obsessed with language, words that save the dense world from extinction. Words confer almost a magical immediacy to experience, but also wound: half-Asian, at the fair he finds a stall with a game called 'Shoot the Gook Down'. The author frames all this as his heritage: 'This is the house... I come from and carry'. The result is amazing and indelible, a brilliant work" – Frank Bidart
"'Romey's Order' will draw you in and forward from the moment you enter its compelling initial image: an enchanted cave of a ditch pipe. The poems are pure joy on the level of the syllable, pure music on the level of the phrase, and pure integrity on the level of the form: a 'pure product of America' – yet one that is sanely exuberant, as real to the touch as a barbed wire fence and as tender to the mind as a willow" – Susan Stewart
"Atsuro Riley's astonishing and original debut collection, 'Romey's Order', thrives off its music. The poems are about the attempt to make sense of the world, to account for all the strange and disparate details that enthrall consciousness, and to hold them in some kind of right relation... There's a lot to marvel at here" – Poetry
"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" – Jim Schley, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A stunning first book of poems... Even read silently, Mr. Riley's delicious words roll and roil in the mouth" – New York Times
"Atsuro Riley's strange, beautiful and unsettling debut is like nothing else you will read this year" – Hudson Review
"One of the most exciting and distinctive debut collections in years" – The Believer
