A Child-World

This is a tender, funny, and achingly beautiful collection of poems that captures childhood as children actually experience it: not as some sentimentalized golden age, but as a world vivid with specific joys. Riley gives voice to Johnty, Bud, Maymie, Alex, and baby Lizzie, a gang of kids roaming the orchards and lanes of a small Indiana town in the 1890s. These aren't poems about children from an adult's wistful distance. They're written as if the children themselves are speaking, in their own colloquial rhythms and inventions. You'll find apple-stealing, homemade carts, the unbearable boredom of visiting relatives, and the private mythology kids build around their world. Riley was the Hoosier Poet, and this is his masterpiece of dialect and affection. It's the kind of book you read slowly, pausing to remember your own summer, your own gang, your own Child-World.