Srikanth Reddy

Voyager

2011
New California Poetry
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Srikanth Reddy, born 1973, lives and works in Chicago

“Jen Bervin’s Nets paves the way for Srikanth Reddy’s ambitious second collection, Voyager, a book-length poem that applies a comparable poetics of erasure to an extended meditation on war and political agency. Unlike Bervin’s and Johnson’s turns to classic literature, Reddy’s source material is the 1985 memoir In the Eye of the Storm, written by Kurt Waldheim, a former UN Secretary-General and president of Austria. From 2003 to 2009, Reddy read and erased the text three times. At the end of Voyager, the poet directs readers to a website with notes and examples from his process. Here, we find entire pages of words crossed out with a thick, dark pen; occasional annotations ghost the margins, but most pages with only a word or two untouched look at once monolithic and ravaged. While not requisite for appreciating Voyager, these curious artifacts announce an obsessiveness that comes across more subtly in the final product.”

– Jennifer Chang, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 14, 2012