Unsignificant

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 currently 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.

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 BooksElsewhere," 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 ReviewEach time Reddy destroys the current state of the poem, a new one emerges, postponing annihilation.—The American Reader

• ContentsThe UnsignificantLike a Very Strange Likeness and PinkWonder: A SyzygySelected Bibliography and Works CitedAcknowledgments