Romey's Order (Phoenix Poets)

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.