Fosterling-Song

Atsuro Riley is the winner of Claremont Graduate University’s 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for poetry, which honors a poet’s first book. Riley is the author of Romey’s Order. He has been awarded the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress, the Pushcart Prize, the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine and The Believer Poetry Award.

Hadn’t he come to us out from County Home

cleaved to a caul-swaddle

cloth (of coarse croker-sack weave)

he all the time plucked and wrung?

“Fosterling-Song” from Romey’s Order by Atsuro Riley. Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

*Photo courtesy of kassandrapoised.