Atsuro Riley

Atsuro Riley reads from Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press), his highly anticipated collection of poems.

“Intoxicating. . . Sounds unheard and unrivaled since Atsuro Riley’s acclaimed debut permeate Heard-Hoard.  His elegant rhythms are atmospheric and robust, his neologisms transform the ‘weed-embrangling snuffle-path,’ his vernacular is magical as ‘dew-sparks galaxifying the crabgrass.’ Amid each mesmerizing reading, like dancing to a good song for a good long time before truly hearing its lyrics, Heard-Hoard’s remarkable stories crystallize; music becomes narrative. Atsuro Riley is an extraordinary poet. This book holds all the meanings of fantastic.” — Terrance Hayes, National Book Award winning poet

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About Heard-Hoard

Winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, this new 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.

About Atsuro Riley

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and  Romey’s Order, which was the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His 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, Riley lives in San Francisco.