An altar is a door; wonder is the key.
In these poems a racialized migrant contends tenderly
with the wounds that form his experience.

To build an entire book around portals and thresholds is to try to create living myth. Tabako on the Windowsill builds from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. These poems follow an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, with multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Canada, and the U.S. Encountering the layered moment, Alluri is guided by a burning attention - to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings. These tensions provide the opportunity for an expansion from the personhood of perception, into a wider world of perspective, achieving through empathy the possibility of transformation.

Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is a migrant poet of Pangasinan, Ilokano, and Telugu descent who lives, loves, and writes on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and Kwantlen, Katzie, and Kwikwetlem lands of Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking peoples, a.k.a. New Westminster, British Columbia. Siya is author of The Flayed City and the chapbook Our Echo of Sudden Mercy. Recipient of the Vera Manuel Award for Poetry, among other prizes, grants, fellowships, and residencies, his work appears through these venues and elsewhere: Apogee, Marias at Sampaguitas, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry, poetry in Canada and — via Split This Rock — Best of the Net. @harialluri.

Hari Alluri's profile page

"Perception and perspective are core to the work that Hari Alluri creates. These poems involve the making of offerings (a form of the internal, or perception), at bodies of water, woods, travel, and windowsills, to name just a few. With this book of modern myth, of elegant lyrical meditations, we are led through vulnerability, social and political engagements, and gestures into spirit with a mature confidence. There is fire here."
- Chris Albani, author of Smoking the Bible