Heard-Hoard

Winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, this collection of verse from Atsuro Riley offers a vivid weavework rendering and remembering an American place and its people.

Recognized for his ＂wildly original＂ poetry and his ＂uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,＂ Atsuro Riley deepens here his uncommon mastery and tang. In Heard-Hoard, Riley has ＂razor-exacted＂ and ＂raw-wired＂ an absorbing new sequence of poems, a vivid weavework rendering an American place and its people.

At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, and a soundscape; an ＂inscritched＂ dirt-mural and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their ＂old appetites as chronic as tides.＂ From the crackling story-man calling us together in the primal circle to Tammy figuring ＂time and time that yonder oak,＂ this collection is a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a finalist for PEN America’s Voelcker Poetry Award, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2021, and a Bookworm Top 10 Book of the Year. His 2010 book Romey’s Order was the winner of the Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. Riley’s work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine. Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, he lives in San Francisco. He is the editor of Revel, a literary journal.