Tabako on the Windowsill

An altar is a door; wonder is the key.
In these poems a racialized migrant contends tenderly
with the wounds that form his experience.

To build an entire book around portals and thresholds is to try to create living myth. Tabako on the Windowsill builds from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. These poems follow an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, with multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Canada, and the U.S. Encountering the layered moment, Alluri is guided by a burning attention - to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings. These tensions provide the opportunity for an expansion from the personhood of perception, into a wider world of perspective, achieving through empathy the possibility of transformation.