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

"Hari Alluri's Tabako on the Windowsill is poetry at its most exquisite - offering us language that simultaneously burns and ripples across oceans, between loss and hope, longing and love. With music and tenderness, Alluri gives voice to the profound and the sacred in our everyday lives, the hinge between what is inherited and what is found. These poems are unafraid to step into the ugliness of stretching 'toward our beautifulest selves' in a world where 'smoke works like grief', Anagolay waits at the windowsill. This collection is an offering all its own - precise, moving and full of wonder."
- Selina Boan, author of Undoing Hours

"These poems are guided by movement: movement through time and distance, through place and through histories of migration and arrival, movement through memory and from the everyday world to the supernatural. Time, in this collection, is fluid. These poems open onto the past, then collapse into a present here-ness, and this shifting conception of time, smoothly executed, structures much of the work, and suggests that in diaspora, the present moment is translucent. These poems look through the present to offer a glimpse of family histories, myths, and people who are no longer with us, yet whose desires and aspirations shape how we imagine."
- Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroad and Magnetic Equator

"In Hari Alluri's Tabako on the Windowsill, meditation and intimation are one and the same. The humble voice that is the self chooses the quiet conversation of one to the other over the idea of the poet in the world. There is no pulpit or platform or positioning in these words, no assertion of poet and thus the work of the truest kind of poetry. I am fortunate to have been gifted the privilege of celebrating its arrival. Like all great works of literature, it will change our lives."
- Truong Tran, author of The Book of the Other and 100 Words