The Flayed City by Hari Alluri

The Flayed City is a discerning work done by Hari Alluri that finds therapy in poetry, the author of 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. The experiences mentioned in the book are meaningful and not easy to comprehend, but the word picks and descriptions twist and delight, creating something classical presented in a way that is truly the author’s own.

Hari has done phenomenal work in enhancing classical and tempting virtues of the book as certain warnings tuned with a poetic style we see.

A Warning—

don’t let the open window wake up

before you. It will take up the things in your room

like a soldier, read the covers of your books

in ways you can’t. Astounded—

leave you—as the air after thunder.

A Warning—

don’t slice an apple toward yourself

because apples have no blood of their own.

The warnings are not meaningless as on a deep look they reveal nothing but the facts. He has framed the warnings from the materialistic aspect but certainly, they apply to humans if thought relatively.

Hari brings his signature sharp, perceptive, subtle language to a poetic collection contemplating the reader. The immense sharp imaginations we often get to read in this book, one of the remarkable ones I mention below.

“If there is a kitchen in heaven, let us have razors

so we can scrape the embossment of boiled-over

sauce charred to the stove.”

Most of the poems have been crafted without any supporting title which looks strange however, Hari’s writings without titles leave more influence on the reader. Hari is perhaps most in his element in his wide imaginative poems, which are astoundingly devoid of sentimentality but nevertheless styled in such a way that the ostensible simplicity divulges many coats of evocative complexity as each poem progresses.

                                                                                                                                                   ---   Rochak Agarwal

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