A Holy Dread - by R A Villanueva (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Alice James Award

"...the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us the most..."
--Mary Ruefle, On Fear

Inspired by the poet's experiences as an educator, a son, and a Filipino American simultaneously reflecting on personal history and looking ahead to fatherhood, the poems of A Holy Dread emerge from the poet's questions, hopes, and unshakeable fears about the world we've created and have yet to create; the world our children will inherit.

From within the glow of the everyday, the poems of A Holy Dread approach topics such as mortality, grief, death, generation, and Anthropocene with formal balance and restraint. Villanueva's intense, tight lyrics mirror the speaker's reality: flooded with equal wonderment and worry, tenderness and calamity, beauty and grief.

Unrelenting, the poems consistently simmer with a musicality that often evokes a feeling of prayer or pleading. Our speaker traverses the complex emotional states of peril, fear, wonder, and faith with unflinching precision and all the grace and bravery of a new father intimately aware of all that is at stake. Through a spectrum of forms and reckonings, the poems in this collection search for joy and hold it dear, even as things fall apart all around us.

About the Author

R. A. Villanueva is the author of A Holy Dread, winner of the 2024 Alice James Award, and Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). His work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets and NPR, and appears widely in international publications such as Poetry London and The Poetry Review. His honors include commendations from the Forward Prizes and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Born in New Jersey, he currently lives in Brooklyn, NYC.