A Holy Dread

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” 

In this highly anticipated second collection of poetry, R. A. Villanueva 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. 

A Holy Dread 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.

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.