“Hari Alluri is Michaux for our time. Which is to say: he is the poet who is able to find myth in our days of sorrow and displacement, when so many lose homes and identities, Hari Alluri offers a new music. When cities are destroyed by fire, Hari Alluri offers lyric fire that heals the heart, that lets the imagination save us. When there is nothing left to say and the page of our drive to stop the pain is brightly-lit and blank, Hari Alluri brings a few words that sing, brings them by the hand, gives them to us—not just words but images, sparks, from which the fire comes, from which whole villages are alive again. This is the poet to live with.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa

“Hari is one of the best young poets writing today. His voice is at once smart, meditative, funny and fraught. And yes, he also knows how to write a gorgeous line.”
—Marilyn Chin, author of Hard Love Province

“In its commitment to action and an ethical destabilising of the ‘I’, Hari Alluri’s Flayed City is a guide through layers of identity, language, association and loss. We enter the city as a metaphorical space, as a complex location, with poems that speak to a nomadic subjectivity, always traversing the knowable world of empathy and memory. Alluri’s sumptuous language, his prophetic warnings and his carving up of the visible world with sonic alacrity, are a testament to our times. He ‘eyes the eye’ with the lyric ‘we’ of human compassion—Flayed City puts its ear to the earth and sings an unforgettable chorus.”
—Sandeep Parmar, author of Eidolon

Told with a “contraband tongue,” Hari Alluri’s The Flayed City witnesses the city in transformation—a ghosted landscape which holds reached-across oceans, collapsed mornings and imminent danger. Despite ever-present soldiers, despite oil-slicked rift, The Flayed City is a love song to difficult memory, to naming a “thousand pent-up names” swelling in the grass, a tender letter voicing “a yearning to arrange our grief” in a future world desperate against war.
—Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart’s Traffic

“Nearby, in the phosphorescence,” these poems of The Flayed City hunger for the miraculous accuracy of lyric. They perceive and persist as language must, determined to remember, to disperse forgetting. Hari Alluri carries the cadence of the city, and that which survives and postpones it.”
—Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of Hyperboreal