Underworld Lit

(Hardback)

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Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyondtesting readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

Reviews

Reddy's bravery as a poet lies in his humbling acquiescence to a process that leads to such uncomfortable truths -- how can we judge the dead, who do not cease in the grave and whose lives cannot help but serve as the material for shaping our world How do we make the world different when we are faced with the dilemma of our essential sameness By making a poem that is a new world out of an old text, Reddy invites us to imagine how we might remake the world out of our grievous histories.
--Los Angeles Review of Books

Elsewhere, to Reddy, is that place about which we never know enough. We pick up its signal in snatches of extinct, invented, or arcane dialect. Reddy's mastery--astonishing in its emotional depth, rhetorical facility, formal control, and lightness of touch--inheres in his marshalling of these snatches and bursts into fresh and unforgettable art.
--Boston Review

Each time Reddy destroys the current state of the poem, a new one emerges, postponing annihilation.
--The American Reader

Author Bio

Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave, 2020), Voyagernamed one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPRand Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Times and The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.