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

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.