Underworld Lit

by Srikanth Reddy

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268214
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave, 2020), Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and 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.

Read an Excerpt

XIII.

Upon reading the scroll, affairs from long ago began to infiltrate Chen's memory, albeit in a disordered and cloudy fashion. He thanked his old retainer. A passing dragonfly landed on his sleeve.

"Your presence has been requested at the Lower District Court," the motorized airport staircase informed him. "Would you prefer to travel on foot, or by some other means?"

"Whoever heard of a legendary warlord trudging through the mud?" protested the cadaverous valet, already beginning to fade around the edges. Ascending the scuffed metal steps, Chen reluctantly bid his former factotum farewell.

After a journey of many leagues, the staircase arrived at a red river moving slowly through jungle. Two boys swam against the current, their heads dipping in and out of view. Chen noted how their blowguns helped them to stay afloat. He could see shimmering clouds of butterflies suspended above the leafy canopy on the far shore.

Up to this point in his travels, Chen had marveled at his expeditious conveyance, which traversed mountains and deserts alike without any action on his part. But now he protested in vain as the rattling contraption sped into the river's shallows. Chen waved to the boys midstream, calling for assistance. Out of earshot, they waved back. The staircase pushed on through the deepening flow.

As the waters rose around him, Chen's soaked robes grew impossibly heavy, dragging the former assistant magistrate down, down, into the crimson flux. The last thing he remembered was his mouth filling with blood, which he sensed, somehow, wasn't his own.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher