Romey''s Order

From Chord : come the marrow-hours when he couldn''t sleep, the boy river-brinked and chorded. Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided. Sieved our alluvial sounds - 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 storytelling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind. See more