Tabako on the Windowsill by Hari Alluri

What losses and intimacies bring you to this threshold? Tabako on the Windowsill contends tenderly with such questions, initiating through them the work of transformation.

To shape an entire book around portals and thresholds is to search for living myth. Hari Alluri’s poems build from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. Following an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, Alluri offers multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the U.S., and Canada. Guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings – Alluri creates moments where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.

Praise for Tabako on the Windowsill:

“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 Abani, 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