Heard-Hoard
ALICE FAY di CASTAGNOLA AWARD from THE POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Recognized by the Whiting Awards for his ‘wildly original’ poetry and his ‘uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,’ Atsuro Riley extends and 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 and remembering an American place and its people.
At once an album of tales and portrait gallery and soundscape, ‘inscritched’ dirt-mural and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices, shot through as they are with their (mostly human) histories and their 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,’ Atsuro Riley’s new collection is a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore, ‘a lit meat-mesh of heards.’
Publishing U.S. and UK ~September 2021
To order a copy of the book for review, write to: press_publicity@uchicago.edu