Srikanth Reddy's first book of poetry Facts for Visitors
received the Asian American Literary Award in 2005.
His work has appeared in various journals,
including APR, Fence, Grand Street, jubilat,
and Ploughshares.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and doctoral candidate
at the University of Chicago, Reddy
is currently an Assistant Professor of English
at the University of Chicago.
Reddy's book Facts for Visitors grapples with the known world
and its edges, language, death, and space,
and pushes up against what is unknown,
both internal and external.
By the last poem, we find hints of the visitors
to whom the book is addressed as he writes,
"in less than 40,000 years, this craft will drift
through the nearest system, bearing greetings in 57
languages, including the encoded song of the humpback whale.
By then, our tongue will have crossed into extinction
or changed utterly."
Reddy's poems are voluptuous with image and sensory detail,
traveling from a rusty black knife, which
unseams the sunset to milky earth at the river's edge.
Or the sky's darkest plumage, flashing fresh streaks of lilac
in this ocean, my ink pot.
The sound and feel of this book's words in one's mouth
is at once pleasurable and rending.
The luscious language of these poems
is weighted by the poignancy of Reddy's writing--
poignancy at a slight remove, as though we
are being offered the world by an observer who
is transparent or only partially present,
allowing the light and dark of the represented world
to pass through them with little distortion.
Each poem endeavors to pin down an experience as something
which can be articulated and shared.
And yet the world of this book is a world
in which the emotion underlines shared experience scatters
like hundreds of jackfruit blossoms
in the wind of our breath.
And so in the end, we find ourselves mostly alone.
It is my honor and my great pleasure
to introduce Srikanth Reddy.