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Hari Alluri is an author who, according to U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, “carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape.” 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 Flayed City sweep together “an archipelago song” scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual—of displacement, of family, of violent yet delicate masculinity, of undervalued yet imperative work—Alluri’s lines quiver with the poet’s distinctive rendering of praise and lament steeped with “gravity and blood” where “the smell of ants being born surrounds us” and “city lights form constellations // invented to symbolize war.”

praise