Tabako on the Windowsill

An altar is a door; wonder is the key.

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.

Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is an uninvited migrant poet of Philippine and South Indian descent living, writing, and working on unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and Ts’uubaa-asatx lands of Hul’q’umi’num-speaking peoples. Author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press), carving ashes (CiCAC/Thompson Rivers Press), and chapbooks Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press) and The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel Press), siya is a recipient of the Vera Manuel Award for Poetry and grants from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council of the Arts, and National Film Board of Canada, among other prizes, grants, fellowships and residencies.