Books by Srikanth Reddy

Underworld Lit

by Srikanth Reddy

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 beyond—testing 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.

Voyager (Volume 31) (New California Poetry)

by Srikanth Reddy

Srikanth Reddy’s second book of poetry probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim―Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht―who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

Speculations (The future is ______) (TRIPLE CANOPY)

by Christian Parenti, Rachel Kushner, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, David Rieff, Ted Chiang, Trevor Paglen, Silvia Federici, Srikanth Reddy, Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, Jayce Clayton, Samuel Delany, N. Katherine Hayles, Josh Kline, Lynn Leeson, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeni Morozov, Hu+O+Ng Ngô

In summer 2013 Triple Canopy invited writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists and technologists to bet on the future: which future do you want to see realized? How precisely can you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? The answers were presented as Speculations ("The future is ______"), 50 days of lectures and discussions at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy's contribution to the exhibition EXPO 1: New York. This book, a lexicon of the central terms of Speculations, conveys the relationship between ideation and action and suggests viable approaches to interpreting and changing the world. Triple Canopy considers economic interventions ("guaranteed basic income"), political abstractions ("autonomy," "prometheanism"), figments of the imagination ("planetary colonization"), modes of expression ("science fiction") and useful neologisms ("hedge-fund utilitarians").

Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry

by Srikanth Reddy

Theoretical accounts of modern American poetry often regard literary texts as the expression of a subjectivity irremediably fractured by the dividing practices of power. In Changing Subjects, Srikanth Reddy seeks to redress our critical bias toward a fatalistic poetics of rupture and fragmentation by foregrounding a fluent tradition of writers from Walt Whitman to John Ashbery who explore digression, rather than disjunction, as a rhetorical strategy for the making of modern poetry.

Mapping the ramifying topography of literary digression, Changing Subjects offers a wide-ranging anatomy of "the excursus" within twentieth-century American poetics. Moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to figures of identity, Reddy considers various spheres in which American writers revisit and revise our models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in modern literature. In new readings of authors such as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, and Lyn Hejinian, this study proposes that "changing the subject" offers a digressive method for negotiating the vexing complexities of art, knowledge, history, and subjectivity under the curious conditions of modernity. The book concludes with a survey of "Elliptical" strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery's aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the twenty-first century.

Conversities

by Dan Beachy-Quick, Srikanth Reddy

Poetry. "The written 'I' is famously slippery, and never more than in this seamless collaboration that places the pronoun's definition at its constantly decentered center. In four distinct sections, all perfecting a language rich in intriguing specifics and delightfully sharp surprises, the collection shows two contemporary masters in a brand new light, creating a new 21st century poet right on the spot, and one with a particularly promising and important voice."—Cole Swensen

Facts for Visitors: Poems (Volume 12) (New California Poetry)

by Srikanth Reddy

Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice," imagines the posthumous narrative of "then’s" that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems obliquely revisits Dante's ethical landscape of the afterlife.

Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined postcolonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves’ Market." Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and ressentiment of postcolonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto." Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.

The Unsignificant

by Srikanth Reddy

The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award-finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015.

True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it's not about--not the logical proofs of philosophy but the affective flux of poetry. The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Brueghel's "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," Hermann Rorschach's inkblots, or Galileo's drawings of the moon. Ranging from pictorial backgrounds in visual art to portraiture and similes to the poetics of wonder, The Unsignificant embarks on an unsystematic, errant, and eccentric tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present.