Underworld Lit

By Srikanth Reddy Description Reviews Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize TLS Book of the Year for 2020Simultaneously 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. Palpable in Underworld Lit is the desire for something that is bigger and wiser than the tools we have for j