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Srikanth Reddy

I promised my wife that I would call Dr. Song today. After putting Mira down for her nap and slipping outside for a smoke, I lifted the receiver. The sound it emitted, which I have heard without pause countless times before, seemed to me otherworldly now, like somebody’s finger playing on the wet rim of a crystal bowl in a derelict theater before the wars.

It’s hard to say how long I stood there listening. It may have been seconds or seasons. The rings of Saturn kept turning in their groove. For reasons beyond me—our seminar had already moved on from late medieval Europe to developing world underworlds—I dialed 1-800-INFERNO, and before the first ring, a woman’s voice answered in heavily accented English.

“Is it you?”

“I think so,” I replied. Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their pale spinning leaves in real time. Focusing on one as it fell seemed to slow the general descent.

“Oh creature, gracious and good,” the faraway lady recited, as if reading, against her will, from a prepared text, “traversing the dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood.” I could hear rain trickling in a gutter spout on the other end of the line.

“Please,” I said into the receiver, “remove my name from your list.”

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Headshot of Srikanth Reddy 2025

Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, and The Washington Post; he is the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His book of lectures on poetry and painting, The Unsignificant, was published by Wave Books in Fall 2024.

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Underworld Lit
Wave Books

Seattle, Washington

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"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

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