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…