The Flayed City

Hari Alluri has been described by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as a writer who carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape. In The Flayed City, he offers an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants in a collection of charged poems that sweep together an archipelago song scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual--displacement, family, violent yet delicate masculinity, 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. The Flayed City offers a powerful glimpse into a secondary world whose cities, cultural histories and trajectories are hybrids or immigrated versions of this one.