We would like to congratulate Hari Alluri on the official publication of his brand new poetry collection, The Flayed City!

In The Flayed City, Alluri gives an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants, imagining the souls that reside in “broom-filled nights,” “skyscrapers for buoys,” and under an “aluminum rising sun.” The charged poems in the collection sweep together “an archipelago song” scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss.

The Flayed City has already received some heavy praise–Publishers Weekly calls it “a sharp, intimate collection full of aunties and uncles, tender brotherhoods, street sweepers and street dogs, and a longing marked by time and distance” (read the full review here). In a write-up for San Diego City Beat, Seth Combs remarks that “Alluri is subtle and smooth, making the struggle of every migrant his own struggle without wallowing in pity. He makes his city scenes look like every city ever, and every conflict within that city becomes a conflict we must fight together.”

This book has been making the rounds in San Diego–where Alluri lives and works–and Los Angeles. Here’s a brief recap of events:

March 9th: We soft-launched The Flayed City at Border X Brewing in San Diego. The night included readings by Karla Cordero, Julia Evans, Lizz Huerta, Ilya Kaminsky, Paul Lopez, Neelanjana Banerjee, Amen Ra, and, of course, Hari Alluri.

March 15th: Alluri read from The Flayed City at our Skylight Books event, which also featured authors Abeer Hoque and Kazim Ali. After their readings, the writers discussed questions about migration, displacement, and inspiration.

March 16th: Kaya and Kundiman SoCal hosted Poetics, Film–a poetry reading, film screening, and community-based dialogue–at Otros Libros / Other Books, our collaborative bookstore in Boyle Heights (Kaya shares the space with Seite Books and Tiny Splendor Press). Alluri read alongside writers Kimberly Alidio, Kenji C. Liu, Jason Magabo Perez, and mediamaker Gail M. Gutierrez.

March 18th: We hosted Our Faces Etched into the Cityscape, a writing workshop led by Alluri, at Otros Libros. Writers of all ages and backgrounds spent the afternoon composing collaborative poetry and creating collages made from scraps of poems that Alluri provided (he even let participants cut up his galley copy of The Flayed City!).

We’ve had a tremendously busy and exciting month gearing up to this release. We’d like to thank everyone in San Diego and Los Angeles who came out to our events. Hari Alluri is as gifted a reader as he is a writer, and if you were lucky enough to attend one of his events, we know you’d agree.

We can’t wait for you to read (and reread) The Flayed City. Order your copy now!