“Vulnerability as Superpower”: A Review of R.A. Villanueva’s A Holy Dread by Darius Phelps

There are some poets’ work that resonate deeply within your spirit—work that does not simply ask to be read, but to be felt, carried, and returned to in moments when language feels both necessary and insufficient. R.A. Villanueva is one of those poets. But for me, his work goes beyond admiration or influence—R.A. means the world to me. His poetry has been a compass, a companion, and at times, a lifeline. Long before I had language for my own reckonings with faith, grief, masculinity, and survival, his poems were already naming what I was afraid to say aloud.

A Holy Dread finds R.A. at his finest and most vulnerable work yet. The collection does not flinch from exposure; instead, it leans into it, trusting vulnerability not as weakness but as a form of power—a spiritual and artistic discipline. These poems reckon with belief, doubt, inheritance, and the fractures we carry in our bodies and bloodlines. Villanueva understands that dread can be holy, that fear can coexist with devotion, and that survival often requires naming what terrifies us most.

What is especially striking about this collection is its restraint. The poems do not perform pain; they attend to it. R.A. allows silence to do as much work as sound, letting white space, breath, and pause become part of the meaning-making. In doing so, he invites the reader into a practice of listening rather than consumption. This is poetry that teaches us how to sit with discomfort, how to honor what aches without rushing toward absolution.

R.A.’s two collections have also given me something far more personal: the language—and courage—to speak up. As a BIPOC male, I have often been met with silencing, surveillance, or the expectation that my vulnerability be muted or managed. Through R.A.’s work, I found permission to refuse that erasure. His poetry models what it means to engage identity, memory, and lineage as sites of inquiry rather than apology—a practice that deeply informed my own commitment to poetic inquiry and identity work. In reading his collections, I learned that my lived experience is not ancillary to knowledge but central to it; that testimony, especially from men of color, is a form of reclamation. This truth echoes through my writing and teaching, including my reflections on poetic inquiry as a method for exploring identity and belonging, and in my insistence on brotherhood beyond borders—across race, history, and silence. R.A. ‘s work helped me understand that speaking up is not a transgression; it is an act of survival, of scholarship, and of love.

Another current that runs powerfully through R.A.’s work—and one that has deeply shaped me—is his writing on fatherhood. In A Holy Dread, fatherhood is not rendered as authority or certainty, but as responsibility, fear, devotion, and becoming. It is attentive rather than performative. Reading these poems, I felt myself thinking about what it means to inherit a past while also being tasked with protecting a future. R.A.’s portrayal of fatherhood honors softness without surrendering strength, showing how care itself can be, indeed, radical. His work has inspired me to imagine fatherhood—biological, communal, pedagogical—as an ethic: a commitment to presence, to listening, to breaking cycles rather than rehearsing them. It has shaped how I think about the men I come from, the men I teach, and the man I am still learning to be.

On a deeply personal level, A Holy Dread feels inseparable from my own creative and spiritual lineage. R.A.’s poetry has profoundly shaped the way I understand vulnerability on the page—how tenderness and terror can coexist without canceling one another. My collections My God’s Been Silent and The Holy Ghost Lives in Her Laugh owe so much to his fearless engagement with faith and fracture. His work gave me permission to interrogate God without abandoning belief, to write toward the sacred even when it felt distant, bruised, or withheld. He taught me that doubt is not the opposite of devotion, but often its truest form.

Both of R.A.’s collections have given me something I did not always have growing up—or even moving through academic and literary spaces as a BIPOC male: permission to speak. To speak honestly. To speak without apology. Poems like “When Doves,” “Namesake,” “Devotional,” and “Annus Mirabilis” taught me that my voice did not need to be softened, translated, or made palatable to be worthy of listening. In a world that so often demands our silence—or only welcomes our stories when they arrive neatly packaged—R.A.’s work insists on fullness. These poems model what it means to testify without spectacle, to name lineage and faith without dilution, to claim space even when the room would rather you shrink. His writing gave me language for the moments I was talked over, overlooked, or expected to endure quietly. It showed me that survival itself can be a form of speech, and that bearing witness—especially as a man of color—is not only necessary, but indeed, holy.

“Devotional,” in particular—one of my favorite love poems—reshaped the way I understand intimacy and it’s genuine power  on the page. It does not render love as sentiment or declaration, but as practice: a daily, bodily act of attention, return, and reverence. Love, in this poem, is not abstract—it is ritualized, labored over, risked.  Reading “Devotional” taught me that tenderness does not require diminishment, that to love deeply is not to surrender power but to refine it. It offered me a language for writing love that could hold awe and fear at once, devotion without erasure—a lesson that echoes throughout my own work, where love and faith are never clean, but always sincere.

Likewise, “When Doves” remains one of the most instructive poems I return to. Set against the image of rock doves tended in a cave—creatures bound to ritual, care, and survival—the poem moves toward the speaker’s mother, whose laughter persists in the face of illness and mortality. What stays with me is how Villanueva refuses a singular register: grief does not cancel joy; devotion does not negate humor. The poem holds inheritance, faith, and fragility together without resolving them. In doing so, it models a way of writing lineage that is neither sentimental nor distant, but fiercely alive. “When Doves” taught me that survival can laugh, that faith can live in the body, and that memory—especially maternal memory—can be both shelter and fire.Throughout A Holy Dread, the body becomes both altar and archive. Memory moves through muscle and marrow, through ritual and rupture. Masculinity is complicated rather than collapsed; faith is interrogated rather than discarded. Villanueva writes toward a tenderness that feels earned—a tenderness born from sitting with grief, uncertainty, and inherited silence. His vulnerability becomes an act of generosity, offering readers permission to dwell in their own unanswerable questions. In a literary landscape that often rewards certainty and spectacle, A Holy Dread insists on another way of being. It reminds us that poetry can be a site of reverence and reckoning, that vulnerability—when handled with such care, courage, and precision—is not merely brave, but transformative. For me, R.A.’s work has always been a reminder that survival itself can be sacred—and A Holy Dread stands as a testament to that truth, and one I will never take for granted.