Our Echo of Sudden Mercy

by Hari Alluri

Our Echo of Sudden Mercy searches for the tenuous places where grief and joy entwine. At turns meditative, irreverent, and tender, the poems trace these threads through multiple forms of loss-personal and familial, cultural and planetary, quiet and violent-by encountering and moving through the everyday. "We have always been the consequence of stories," they intone. Here, attentive to the ode in downbeats of lament, Alluri finds a restorative that the incantatory in the fragmented can be heard as a form of wholeness, that displacement can become a way of being in the world, one which holds and is held by listening, by care and collaboration.

50 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2022

About the author

Hari Alluri is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya, 2017), Carving Ashes (CiCAC, 2013) and the chapbook The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel, 2016). An award-winning poet, educator, and teaching artist, his work appears widely in anthologies, journals and online venues, including Chautauqua, Poetry International and Split This Rock. He is a founding editor at Locked Horn Press, where he has co-edited two anthologies, Gendered & Written: Forums on Poetics and Read America(s): An Anthology. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University and, along with the Federico Moramarco Poetry International Teaching Prize, he has received VONA/Voices and Las Dos Brujas fellowships and a National Film Board of Canada grant. Hari immigrated to Vancouver, Coast Salish territories at age twelve, and writes there again.

Reviews

[Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and cathartic--Hari's transformative poetry reminds you not to be afraid of the shadows. He is saying "Go to the places you're scared of! You might just learn something."

It's the smudges on the window that hold on to the light.

[lou garciadolnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

forgot to put this one in my 2023 reads! one of my favourite chapbooks ever~ i returned to it again and again~ alluri is an alchemist.