Heard-Hoard

What Atsuro Riley seeks in Heard-Hoard, his second collection of poems, is the “lucernal core” of his upbringing in the South Carolina lowcountry, memories lamplit in the marshland, the sounds of family, mentors, even a dog and bird, blended into something fleshly and radiant, “a lit / meat-mesh of heards.” Riley captures the accents of his hardscrabble world through language worked to a country eloquence: “riveled-looking,” “runched up like a grub,” “I followfeel the roots of him.” 

As the “story-man encircling us binding us by lard-torch and ditty,” Riley tells of a young boy and his brother who become “pickup-slaves” when a boss man trucks them upcountry to work on a tobacco crew. The lowcountry is “low on daddies hereabouts,” and their father is mostly a dropped phone connection, gone 

By war by
drink by
gun by
drift

A cast of characters that includes Candy, whose “stop” the brothers are dumped at after their “yoked” labor ends, an oak-lover named Tammy, and a former Vietnam-War P.O.W. named Johnny Pep all pass through, offering lessons of lore and endurance: "I learned to lie in want / for succor-food; for forms; I gaped I gulped for what I got." The “forms” of Riley’s writing radiate organically from the lowcountry like a plant embryo developing roots, what he calls “radicle stories.”

The most memorable figure in Heard-Hoard is the boys’ mother, Tetsu-san, an iron-willed Japanese immigrant who makes a living boiling sea water for salt. The speaker observes the tamped-earth shed that “she wracked and made,” noting with a son’s wonder: “Could I be the flickering in her structure.” The locals view her as “Not natural : Not from here,” fetishize her sexually, torch her yard. But in her endurance Riley finds the “pure / is-ness / of Necessity” and the affecting core of his project, to make of alienation a home:

I been brought from cross the water far—
    every bone a alien never not.
(No soil no roots yall clinch so hard
    for home gon’ be my home.)