A Holy Dread

Second collection from award-winning Filipino American poet.

A Holy Dread reckons with identity, family, and history to illuminate the beauty and grief our children will inherit. With a foreword by Sarah Howe.

“A Holy Dread is the kind of book you want everyone to read so you can talk about it with everyone.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

A Holy Dread reckons with identity, family, and history to illuminate the tenderness and calamity of the world we make together—the beauty and grief our children will inherit. R. A. Villanueva’s poetry emerges from essential questions and fierce hopes about why we create, who we hold dear, and how we might brave "every small / catastrophe laced with joy." Inspired by his experiences as a Filipino American writer, educator, son, and father, Villanueva's revelatory new book expands on his celebrated debut, Reliquaria, with grace and intensity.

Through explorations of faith and myth, experiments with praise songs, sonnet sequences, devotionals and lyric fragments, Villanueva's poems dare to reach for "all-trembling miracles" even as things fall apart around us.

This edition carries a new foreword by Sarah Howe.