Reddy, Srikanth: Underworld Lit

Wave Books, paperback

Publication Date: August 4, 2020

Publisher Marketing: "An epic journey through multiple hells taking place just below the surface of a college professor's day-to-day life."

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